If you want to claim bacon is as hazardous to your health as plutonium and mustard gas, go to the U.S. National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, Ramazzini Institute, or just go right to the trial lawyers many of them are either consulting for already or at least hope to soon.

But even they are not going to rush to defend this paper claiming preventing cavities leads to lower IQ. Oh wait, they will, some of this stuff even comes from NIEHS.(1)

Now add Canada to the French, Anerican and Italian groups who are out to undermine public confidence in health. In a new assault on science, the authors, one of whom is funded by NIEHS and another who is an expert witness in a trial against fluoride, didn't measure any fluoride, they just use how much tap water pregnant women reported they drank as a proxy for fluoride and then note an IQ test difference in boys born in areas with and without fluoridation. Yet since the half-life of urinary fluoride is 5 hours how is any of this even possible? They concede it may not be but still go full-on Fred vom Saal and claim it must be that boys absorb toxins better.

Occam's razor instead shows it's "statistical wobble." You can write it, and clearly JAMA Pediatrics will publish it, but that doesn't make it sound science.

The paper is so suspect Michael Price, writing in Science, even found a Harvard epidemiologist to be suspicious, and their School of Public Health almost single-handedly created food scaremongering with their chronic abuse of food questionnaires.

NOTE:

(1) About 15 years ago there was still some chance that NIEHS could be trusted guides for the public but once Linda Birnbaum took over in 2009, they have become the kind of scaremongers that epidemiology once used to protect us from. Her retirement can't come soon enough but indications are that Environmental Defense Fund darling and anti-science activist Ivan Rusyn is lobbying to take her place. While it's hard to imagine the nonsense could get much worse, he's one way to insure it.