Also, do you really believe a study of 12 rats could "prove" something about humans?
I won't respond to that.
Well that was the headline given by infowars. It has caused me to call their integrity into question. Its not good for a news org to mindlessly parrot what they are told. It is also not good to exaggerate the news just because it confirms the journalist's previously held beliefs.
Why are the weights in the table about 50% of normal rat weight, even in the control group. And why is the standard deviation so small (it is not normal for 6 rats to weigh within 2 grams of each other... possible, but not normal). Very strange. Of course, they fail to mention exactly how old the rats were when the study started making it difficult to tell what really went on. Did they just make up this data? Did they drop some animals from the study? We don't know. Therefore it is a crap paper.
You are nit-piking information. What about the "Organ somatic index" figure?
Well another flaw of this paper is they don't say how they calculated the index. From looking at it, I would
guess (I am being forced to guess because this paper is crap) that it was something like brain weight divided by body weight at the end of the study times 100. I guess this because a rat brain is about 1-2 grams. Because this outcome measure is derived from the body weight measurement, and their weight measurements are inconsistent with the literature as well as reported inconsistently within the paper, I also do not put much stock in those values. Also, the result reported here is basically saying that rats treated with fluoride have brains half the size (or half the density) of normal. Think about it, that difference is HUGE, HUGE, HUGE. They spend almost no time discussing it at all. This is once again very strange behavior by these researchers. Further, such a huge difference has never been observed for humans, which (even if we accept this result) calls the "clinical relevance" of this study into question.
The paper states:
Following the treatment period the rats
were euthanized and the brain (further dissected
into cerebellum, neocortex and hippocampus)
spinal cord and sciatic nerve were removed for
TEM studies.
I guess they didn't weight the whole rat with skin & tail only the organs they were studying.
Like I mentioned above, an entire rat brain is only going to be a couple of grams. The spinal cord will weigh less than a gram, and sciatic nerve even less than that. No way it gets anywhere near 100 grams. So no.
I don't want my argument to rest on my expertise.
You are the one who has to prove your expertise not me disprove it.
All I ask is that you try to follow my reasoning, question it when it seems lacking, and agree when it makes sense.