Fluoridation can make all the difference

Fluoridation can make all the difference
By: JOHN VAN DOORN - Staff Writer
By actual count, I have lived in 13 communities in various parts of the country that delivered fluoridated water.
No tooth of mine has fallen out as a result. No disease of molar or gum has rendered me unfit for human assemblies. When I am shunned, it is almost always on social, political, spiritual or intellectual grounds. Oral hygiene has never entered into it. Clearly, fluorides have served me well.
I offer this testimony because we are reminded ---- were reminded, to be precise, last week ---- that on Dec. 3 the water supplies for San Diego County are to be fluoridated.
That date is actually a delay, the second since August when fluorides were supposed to enter the pipes and be dispatched to San Diego by the Metropolitan Water District. All recent dates are delays, for that matter. Fluoridation talk has flooded the region for four years.
The water guys had to spend billions in improvements at five treatment plants to get things to this point, so what's the big deal about a month here, a fortnight there?
Patience is the watchword, and you may find it pertinent to this conversation to learn that in one of the communities where I lived a lot of people were convinced that fluorides helped them to be more patient.
It wouldn't surprise me if it were true. If you've got a substance entering your body that will keep your teeth in jake condition, it seems logical that something as soft and pliant as the Patience Lobe in the left brain would be a snap for fluorides.
Other physiological benefits have accrued to me over the years. After long thought but no supportive data whatever, I have come to the conclusion that fluorides were my benefactors.
Check this list, if you doubt me:
I am uncommonly handsome. That is not my judgment alone, although I find myself hard put to refute it. Rather it is the collective opinion of tens of thousands (well, eight) of friends, acquaintances and family members.
Because neither my father nor his father was as chiseled as I, we may deduce: Fluorides blessed me and created this feature-perfect countenance. Those two had no fluoridated water as children.
Theories are one thing, but when rock-solid evidence such as this turns up, it must give pause to doubters.
I never seem to age. When I pass a mirror, I thank my lucky stars for fluorides. I have not aged a whit since I was 24 and a half, and I am no Dorian Gray.

I look at myself and I see no wrinkles to speak of. No thinning of the epidermal layer (skin). I have muscles to burn. I can read signs from far away.
Oh, for reasons of style and trend, I part my hair wider than I used to. Someone once laughed and said to me that I might be getting bald. My response then was the same as today: my follicle count is enormous, and if I wished to I could grow thick curls or affect laconic waves. A pompadour is not out of the question.
I simply don't get any older. Fluorides have taught me that age is not a state of mind at all, but a physiological certainty, to be held in check so long as I drink the water.
I drink the water.
Opponents of fluoridation say that the water is OK as it is in San Diego. They say they don't much care what nearly every city, county and state in the nation drink. They don't want fluorides introduced into the supply by fiat, or by the water authority. Individual freedom counts a lot with them, and this would chip away, they say.

I can only respond that fluoridation has meant the world to me. Without it, I am positive, I'd be five-feet nine or so, a decrepit senior rocking on the porch, afraid to leave lest someone kick sand into the creases, crevices and crevasses of his grown-old face, like moraine when a glacier withdraws.

Instead, fluoride full, I remain, as some of you know, six-foot-five, with green flashing eyes and catlike movements.

Contact columnist John Van Doorn at (760)739-6647 or jvandoorn@nctimes.com.

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