This is Civics 101. I'm Hannah McCarthy. Today we're bringing you an episode from our colleagues at Outside In. The topic? Fluoride. The municipal fluoridation of water is a prime example of the kind of policy we love to dig into on this podcast. And it's very much

at top of mind for a lot of people right now as President Trump's nominee to run the Department of

Health, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has called for the reversal of longstanding government recommendations

to add fluoride to municipal water supplies, one of the many

controversial stances he's promised to bring to that job.

The history of local water fluoridation is complicated, which is what today's story is about,

as well as some surprising and conflicting ideas about whether the mineral is beneficial to our health or not.

Outside In host, Nate Hedgy digs into all of that and more. Let's take a listen.

Let's go back to the year 1901.

The man, a young dentist named Frederick McKay.

He had just arrived in a small frontier town called Colorado Springs, and as soon as he got there,

he noticed something strange. The townspeople, who became his dental patients, had dark brown spots all over their teeth.

We are talking the color of chocolate.

But interestingly, when he looked at them, he noticed that they didn't have cavities.

Brown teeth, few cavities.

That, by the way, is Renee Nahara. He's an epidemiologist and director

of public health at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. He says Frederick McKay noticed

this was a regional thing. In other towns, kids had teeth that were normal for the time,

with plenty of cavities, but they were nice and white teeth.

The condition was nicknamed Colorado Brownstain.

Locals blamed the phenomenon on a number of things.

Eating too much pork, drinking funky milk.

...