Fluoride in tap water

bonnie_2

Will an ordinary water filter get rid of it or do you need something else.

geordie_joe

bonnie wrote: »

Will an ordinary water filter get rid of it or do you need something else.

I don't know, but I spent the first 38 years of my life in an area with fluoride in the water and I can tell you it makes no difference.

Life's too short to be worrying about that, you'd be better of stuffing mushrooms.

bonnie_2

Have you actually read up on fluoride. Apparently hitler used it to control the birth rate.

Cardelia

At the concentrations found in tap water, fluoride is harmless. People who get worked up about this conveniently forget (or just don't know in the first place) that fluoride occurs naturally in tap water anyway. In some areas the natural concentration of fluoride is higher than the artificially topped up concentrations of fluoride but are there any problems? No.

As with all things in life, too much of it is bad for you. But to ingest enough fluoride from tap water to cause a problem, you'd need to drink so much water you'd probably die of hyponatremia first. It's just not an issue for me and I don't believe there's any scientific evidence which proves fluoride, at the concentration found in tap water, is harmful in any way shape or form.

geordie_joe

bonnie wrote: »

Have you actually read up on fluoride. Apparently hitler used it to control the birth rate.

Oh my god, you think fluoride is a contraceptive!

OK, hitler used it to control the birth rate, it didn't work!!!!

jinnan_tonnix

Dental fluorosis (mottling) is a real problem. Research also suggests that it could cause fragile bones, but I'm a little unsure of this.

Without wanting to get into a big debate - the pros and cons are available for all to see - personally, I think the water companies should be responsible for delivering clean, safe, uncontaminated drinking water, and not a vehicle for mass medication.

In any case, as a flouride delivery system, it's an absurdly inefficent one. Most drinking water isn't drunk, but used for washing, cleaning or just flushed straight down the toilet.

If I want to ingest flouride, it should be my choice.

Oh and another thing: Isn't the main cause of tooth loss gum disease rather than tooth decay? So when your teeth fall out, at least they won't have any holes in them. Marvelous.


Edit: Oops - got so worked up I forgot to answer the original question. From what I've read, most filters will NOT remove flouride. But contact your filter manufacturer.

To remove flouride, you can use Reverse Osmosis Filtration, Activated Alumina Defluoridation Filter and Distillation Filtration, whatever the hell they are!

Toothsmith

bonnie wrote: »

Have you actually read up on fluoride. Apparently hitler used it to control the birth rate.

That's a new one on me!!

I'd heard the one where Hitler used it in concentration camps to dull brains and supress thoughts of uprising!!!

Still absolute tosh though.

The anti-fluoride people are a bunch of completely unethical liars who bombard the internet with so much made up bull$hit that they hope someone will think something is true. (Much like Georbles used propaganda films)

Hitler is often used as a name that insights great emotion in people, and so turn people against the thing that he is supposed to have done.

Pro-smoking groups often state that Hitler was the first anti-smoking campaigner, as he hated the habit. No idea if that's true or not, but it's another example of the use of Hitler's name.

Very few areas in this country have a theraputic level of fluoride in the water.

For information, I belive water filters won't filter it out, as it's a too smaller ion, but I'm not 100% sure of that.

Just relax and enjoy the benefit of better dental health for yourself and your children.

Toothsmith

jinnan_tonnix wrote: »

Dental fluorosis (mottling) is a real problem. Research also suggests that it could cause fragile bones, but I'm a little unsure of this.

There is no good evidence at all that fluoride in the water at 1ppm does anything detremental to bones at all, and 70% of the USA's water supply, and 60% of Australia's water has been fluoridated for a long time.

Birmingham has been fluoridated for over 40 years, with nothing remarkable happening medically at all, apart from 50% less dental decay than comparable areas of (non fluoridated) Manchester.

Now that it's been there for so long, results are also showing that it has a benefit to the elderly population as well as the more well known benefits to the children.

VISIBLE dental fluorosis mostly occurs after long term over ingestion of toothpaste, not when the water supply is fluoridated, although traces of fluorosis picked up under a good light and with magnification DO increase when water is fluoridated to 1ppm.

It is certainly true that more teeth are lost to gum disease than decay, but that doesn't mean that decay doesn't account for very many. Teeth lost to decay affects children who have little control over what their parents feed them.

Gum disease affects older people who have neglected their teeth for decades when they had the power to do something about it.

Ben84

At high concentrations, ones which are hugely greater than our tap water, and exposure from toothpaste and mouthwash, fluoride has been proven to have bad side effects. However, this statement could be applied to just about anything if you swapped the name 'fluoride' with another substance, for example vitamin C. Not only is an excess of this seemingly healthy substance bad for you, in great extremes it will be fatal.

That's the important thing, nothing is good for you in extremes, so we shouldn't be approaching it from that view. If we considered everything that could be harmful bad, we would not be able to consume or use anything. In fact, many substances that are essential to life would be on this list. Even seemingly innocuous oxygen will kill you outright at significantly higher than natural concentrations, and have nasty side effects at lower increases. Even water can kill you if you drink an extreme amount.

We should be asking what levels of a substance are safe, and what effects it has at different levels. At the right levels a substance can deliver significant benefits, even be vital to life, while at the wrong levels it may be harmful, or at some simply do nothing at all. With exceptions, namely substances considered extremely toxic, the situation is never simply defined as good or bad.

We should also never assume that because a lot of something does something bad, that a little bit will do the same bad thing to a lesser extent. This is only true in some cases. The body is complex. It responds very differently to compounds at different concentrations.

We already accept that taking pain killers or medicine is good for us, yet maintain the idea that we must take the correct dose because too much is bad for you. Dose is important, the right amount does the right thing, while the wrong one may do any number of bad things.

We also need to throw out the idea that natural is always good and artificial always bad. We could extract cyanide from organic almonds and call it something like 'natural organic almond extract'. In this extreme example I'd much rather eat an EU approved synthetic additive. It is also worth noting that the cyanide is present naturally in almonds as cyanide, just so very little we never notice or it seems suffer any side effects from eating them.

Unfortunately, the importance of dose and the widely different effects many substances can produce depending on dose has not been well appreciated by everyone. I see a lot of scary sounding claims about various common things based on extreme consumption. Fluoride is one good example. Many of them use the toxicology studies and talk extensively about the horrible effects the offending compound had, but to be fair the whole point of the toxicology study was to feed the test subject an increasingly higher dose until bad things happened. That's why it's a toxicology study! Suggesting this proves it's bad for you is similar to saying that car crash tests prove a car is bad for you and will inevitably cause the worst things shown in the tests to happen to you.

tbs624

The fact remains that you can dose those who need/want fluoride individually. For it to be added to *everyone's* drinking water is wrong IMO. It is not the role of water companies to deliver "medicine" to us all without our consent.

In addition to those simply who do not want to drink water laced with a cheaply obtained industrial waste product, there are those who have specific health issues, such as thyroid problems, who will be badly affected by a decision to mass medicate with fluoride via our water supplies.

exlibris

Did anyone complain when they legislated to put Iodine in salt?