I grew up in the country, and we drew our water from a natural spring. Every time I went to the dentist and had a cavity, I would always regret not having "city" water. After all, everyone knew that without fluoride in your water, you'd end up with teeth like Halo, right?

I haven't really thought about that in a long time, until recently. Lately, I keep hearing about fluoride not only being irrelevant when we're already using fluoridated toothpaste, but actually being detrimental to our health.

This is a brief and interesting video on the topic:

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What do you think about this?

I've long suspected that subversives were trying to sap and impurify our precious bodily fluids.

I went to school in the "country" we had to everyone once in a while mix up this god awful yucky tasting shit and swish it in class. It was a powder based flouride they mixed with water and then we all got in line and got our little cups and did scynchronized swishing.

I'm so thankful I passed the stage where I had to do that. Other than that I don't think I've ever considered whether my water had flouride or not.

Whenever I hear about flouride in the water being bad for us, I always think of tin-foil hats.....

This is the site where I saw the video:

http://www.fluoridealert.org/

To me, that doesn't seem tin-foil-hat at all.

For example, from a Scientific American article this year:

Most fluoridated water contains much less fluoride than the EPA limit, but the situation is worrisome because there is so much uncertainty over how much additional fluoride we ingest from food, beverages and dental products. What is more, the NRC panel noted that fluoride may also trigger more serious health problems, including bone cancer and damage to the brain and thyroid gland.

A 2006 report by a committee of the National Research Council recommended that the federal government lower its current limit for fluoride in drinking water because of health risks to both children and adults

Clashes over the possible neurological effects of fluoride have been just as intense. Phyllis Mullenix, then at the Forsyth Institute in Boston, set off a firestorm in the early 1990s when she reported that experiments on lab rats showed that sodium fluoride can accumulate in brain tissue and affect animal behavior. Prenatal exposures, she reported, correlated with hyperactivity in young rats, especially males, whereas exposures after birth had the opposite effect, turning female rats into what Mullenix later described as “couch potatoes.” Although her research was eventually published in Neurotoxicology and Teratology, it was attacked by other scientists who said that her methodology was flawed and that she had used unrealistically high dosages. Since then, however, a series of epidemiological studies in China have associated high fluoride exposures with lower IQ, and research has also suggested a possible mechanism: the formation of aluminum fluoride complexes—small inorganic molecules that mimic the structure of phosphates and thus influence enzyme activity in the brain. There is also some evidence that the silicofluorides used in water fluoridation may enhance the uptake of lead into the brain.

The NRC committee concluded that fluoride can subtly alter endocrine function, especially in the thyroid—the gland that produces hormones regulating growth and metabolism. Although researchers do not know how fluoride consumption can influence the thyroid, the effects appear to be strongly influenced by diet and genetics. Says John Doull, professor emeritus of pharmacology and toxicology at the University of Kansas Medical Center, who chaired the NRC committee: “The thyroid changes do worry me. There are some things there that need to be explored.”

Blowing that off just because you think it's a crazy idea is fairly ignorant. At one point, everyone knew smoking cigarettes wasn't bad for you too.

That video looks like it was made in the 80's other than the horrible Starbucks product placement.

I've long suspected that subversives were trying to sap and impurify our precious bodily fluids.


Thank you General Ripper!

Am I the only one that used to eat toothpaste when I was a little kid?

(It was like mint flavored candy, in gel form!)

So does this mean that paying $5.99 for a 5 gallon bottle water is ok now? Cause I haven't drank tap water since I graduated college. Hopefully I'm safe if I haven't been drinking tap water that has been bottled to look like it's not tap water but really is...

This makes me think of my 8th grade Science teacher who used to joke that one day we would find out that the cause of cancer is water or mayo. I'm starting to see his logic. Water could just be the tip of iceberg here!

'After all, everyone knew that without fluoride in your water, you'd end up with teeth like Halo, right?'

- I'm getting heat from a guy who grew up in the wild. That's not good.

Am I the only one that used to eat toothpaste when I was a little kid?

(It was like mint flavored candy, in gel form!)

I used to eat the glue paste they had in 1st grade....God only knows what it did to me! :p

We have well water. It tested pure and free of contaminants recently. However, the water does lack flouride, so our son does have a couple of minor cavities in his baby teeth. We had been giving him flouride drops, but apparently we didn't give them to him for long enough.

The dentist said that the cavities (which, as noted, are minor) shouldn't get any worse if we brush well and use flouride tooth paste. Still, I can't help but thinking that we're to bame for those cavities- if only we had continued the treatment longer, if only we had brushed better, etc.

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I took flouride drops as a child. My mother told me she even took flouride when pregnant in hopes of passing it to me. What good that did taking it while pregnant..probably not a darn thing..LOL

I have never had a cavity all my life. My dentist hates me I bet. I bring in no money to him. :( If I was a dentist would I want to not be able to fill cavities because there was none. It sure would not help me make a living. lol

I do believe flouride helps. My parents teeth are terrible and they brushed. My father had dentures at age 18. All us kids our teeth are great! My mother was diligent about giving us our flouride. I can't think of any factors that would make such drastic differences.

Easier access to better toothpaste and brushes, and more regimented care becoming common. Simple as that.

If you look at the dental health stats around the world, countries without fluoridated water show the same improvement over the last century that fluoridated countries do. There's no correlation.

FLUORIDE CONCENTRATIONS OF WATER SOURCES IN TIBET
Jin Cao,a Yan Zhao, Jianwei Liu, Ruodan Xirao,b Sangbu Danzengb
Changsha and Tibet, China
SUMMARY: Fluoride concentrations of 60 samples randomly selected from
surface and underground water sources in major population regions of northcentral,
central, southern, and southern border regions of Tibet were determined
with a fluoride-ion selective electrode. The concentrations ranged from
0.02 to 0.18 mg F/L with the highest levels in river and well waters. The results
indicate that most drinking water sources in Tibet are low in fluoride and are
therefore not responsible for the widespread occurrence of dental fluorosis
that appears to be caused by early childhood intake of fluoride from highfluoride
“brick tea”.
Keywords: Brick tea, Fluorosis from tea, Tibet water sources, Water fluoride

http://www.fluoride-journal.com/00-33-4/334-205.pdf


Dental fluorosis caused by fluoride in drinking water is a common sight in
many parts of the world.3-5 In Tibet, however, water sources for domestic use
come mainly from rivers, wells, and springs, which, in this study, were all
found to have less than 0.2 mg F/L. Therefore, drinking water type dental fluorosis
would not be expected from any of these waters. Although not often used
as sources for drinking water, the 279 known hot springs in Tibet are reported
to have 1.0 to 212 mg F/L, and the effects are readily seen. For example, in the
village of Kacheng in Xietongmen County, where such water is used for
drinking, the prevalence of dental fluorosis is 67.49%.6
Nevertheless, we found that dental fluorosis was fairly common in our study
areas, even though the drinking water is quite low in fluoride. The explanation
probably lies in the fact that people in Tibet, including young children, have a
long-standing tradition of drinking high-fluoride brick tea made from old stems
and leaves of tea bushes. A "brick tea" type fluorosis that results is prevalent
among many minority populations in China, and it therefore probably accounts
for most of the high prevalence of dental fluorosis we observed among children
in our low-fluoride study areas.7

Interesting. I never would have expected fluoride in tea (other than from the water used to make tea).

http://www.pr-inside.com/first-ever-government-review-of-fluoride-thyroid-r596428.htm

There is clear evidence that small amounts of fluoride, at or near levels added to U.S. water supplies, present potential risks to the thyroid gland, according to the National Research Council's (NRC) first-ever published review of the fluoride/thyroid literature.

...

"A low level of thyroid hormone can increase the risk of cardiac disease, high cholesterol, depression and, in pregnant woman, decreased intelligence of offspring," said Thiessen.

Common thyroid symptoms include fatigue, weight gain, constipation, fuzzy thinking, low blood pressure, fluid retention, depression, body pain, slow reflexes, and more. It's estimated that 59 million
Americans have thyroid conditions.