Of course. Difference between "It's good on your teeth" and "compatible with harmless ingestion", but nooo, lets floridate water because it'll reduce cavaties in people who are too lazy to brush.
uh... you do realize that that study has nothing to do with the United States, as it's covering fluoridation in rural China, where its dosage in public drinking water is several times higher and much less carefully regulated than over here, right?
The study, despite what the doctor might want to believe, is not saying that fluoridation of drinking water is bad, but that over-fluoridation is bad.
While the studies the Harvard team reviewed did indicate that very high levels of fluoride could be linked to lower IQs among schoolchildren, the data is not particularly applicable here because it came from foreign sources where fluoride levels are multiple times higher than they are in American tap water.
Two of the scientists who compiled the Harvard study on fluoride said it really doesn’t address the safety of fluoridation levels typical of American drinking water.
I posted this in another thread elsewhere. I think it's worth noting here:
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Second, fluoride is also fairly healthy and also occurs naturally [in water]...Fluoride poisoning is reasonably possible and does happen, but it's still at about 5-10g ingested over a very short period of time, which would take ~200 000ml (0.03 ppm, or 0.00003% is the typical concentration in drinking water) of water alone to reach. Obviously, you'd die from water poisoning first. Even in toothpaste, where most are about 1-5% fluoride, it would take ~100ml of toothpaste to get a lethal dose. To give you an idea of how much that is, the standard tube of toothpaste is about 90ml, so you'd have to ingest more than one tube of toothpaste in it entirety over a short period of time to reach poisonous levels. No one's going to do that accidentally.
Note that the link in the first post states that the lab tests on rats were at 1 ppm of fluoride, and that, as above, most drinking water in the western world has fluoride at 0.03 ppm concentration. Even to reach that 1 ppm threshold in the lab test, you'd need to drink 33 300ml, or 33.3 litres, per day. Keep in mind that 8 glasses of water is about 2 litres, so you'd need to drink ~133 glasses of water per day for a year. You'd still die of water poisoning (if not drowning) before you suffered any effects from the fluoride, considering that the average body can only absorb about 1 litre per hour (24 litres/day for those that don't wish to do math right now ).
PS. Sorry about the lack of sourcing here. I usually try to source with links whenever I post stuff this technical, but most of this is common knowledge. I can definitely go back and find my sources for this information if anyone requests it, though.
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Originally Posted by kov
In other breaking news, it also turns out that fire is harmful as well, if it's too close to your body.
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Originally Posted by Capital O TEETEE 613
I mean it's in rat poison, so why not tap water??
It's also in toothpaste. In fact, it's in much larger concentrations in toothpaste (like, hundreds of thousands of times larger) than it is in tap water. I guess we should stop brushing our teeth with it then, huh?
Last edited by Leafsdude7: 02-05-2013 at 09:11 AM.
It's also in toothpaste. In fact, it's in much larger concentrations in toothpaste (like, hundreds of thousands of times larger) than it is in tap water. I guess we should stop brushing our teeth with it then, huh?
Vitamin C can kill you and it's in fruit. Time to burn down the orchards.
Vitamin C can kill you and it's in fruit. Time to burn down the orchards.
As I noted above, even pure water can kill you. In fact, damn well anything can kill you at the right dosage.
The problem, as pointed out in the first response by NFS and that I expanded on in my post, is that this article is ignoring the dosage requirement and changing "Fluoride is dangerous at high exposure levels", as the paper quoted is trying to actually say, into "Fluoride is dangerous", and trying to then state/imply that the Fluoride levels in the western world is high enough to meet the levels stated in the paper to result in the specific effects. As I showed, in reality, the average levels in the western world are nowhere near high enough to be relevant to the results in the paper cited.
It's the mark of a poor scientific journalist to post information about a finding and not fully explain its implications. Honestly, the link posted here is Daily Fail-level material.
PS: Here's a source for the 0.03ppm of Fluoride in water I noted earlier. For the record, some sources state as high as 0.1 ppm, but that's the upper limit. While that upper limit seems to suggest larger issues (at 0.1ppm, you'd reach 1ppm in 10 litres, or 40 glasses of water, which, while still high, is no longer in the "you'd die of water poisoning before you have to worry about the Fluoride leves" range), children, who are the centre of this story, generally are going to be able to drink much less than adults, so that 1 litre of water per hour number is likely much lower for them. With that being the case, 10 litres is still probably right around the limit of the amount a child could drink before water intoxication. I'm currently unable to find the exact levels of water absorption levels for children, though, so this is just from my own intuition.
Last edited by Leafsdude7: 02-05-2013 at 11:25 AM.
This has been known in conspiracy circles for a while but people don't care. It's not something that can be studied so easily and be linked to bad health because of how it causes harm over the long term similar to cell phones and kids.
Of course it's not harmful in very very small amounts and of course it is harmful if too much of it is pumped into a communities water supply. However if they wanna add it, they'll add it because our society has lost all sense of fight or protest.
This has been known in conspiracy circles for a while but people don't care. It's not something that can be studied so easily and be linked to bad health because of how it causes harm over the long term similar to cell phones and kids.
I don't know about the cell phones, but I can definitely vouch for kids being harmful over the long term
).
