Fluoride in tap water

A question about : Fluoride in tap water

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

Best answers:

• Have you actually read up on fluoride. Apparently hitler used it to control the birth rate.
• 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.
• 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!
• 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.
• 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.
• Did anyone complain when they legislated to put Iodine in salt?
• You'll see from my previous posts I work within the water filter industry.
  It's about choice.
  People mention Birmingham with regards to Fluoride. In truth the reports from the Pro and Antis are all very convincing BUT one thing you cannot do is shoot someone down because they choose not to want to drink something by force. Fluoride might be tasteless and might be invisible, but I wouldn't dream of forcing someone who drinks tea without sugar to put the stuff in because I believe it's the way it should be drank....
  The Pro fluoridation group will never (ever) win this argument in my mind because frankly it is more about nanny state pandering than it is about the actual issue itself. It would probably be cheaper to give every kid in a deprived area a new toothbrush at school every month (and a tube of toothpaste) with NHS funding, than this debate, the legal arguments, parliament time etc will eventually cost. No doubt dentists would consider that to be of more benefit, and frankly the issue then falls back to choice (you have to remember whilst most people brush their teeth some don't use fluoridated toothpaste by choice as well!).
  In answer to the OPs question though - you have two choices.
  Fluoride can be removed with Reverse Osmosis - which is obviously a bulky-ish piece of kit and it will set you back something like Ј150 for the initial kit.
  You CAN remove fluoride with activated carbon but only the Alumina activated coatings. It is something we do, but to avoid getting shot down for spam I'll give you a generic link about the material below. Note that there is no filter jug we know of that removes Fluoride.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activated_alumina
• That last point is technically true, but then it is true of many other contaminents - if you did a full chemical analysis of water it contains traces of lots of things (arsenic, mercury etc) you'd not want to drink.
  Fluoride occurs in low levels naturally - but is important to realise the proportion/scale when you look at this. If for example, the underlying level of fluoride in the light blue areas is 0.2 parts per million and in an artifically fluoridated area that rises to 1.5ppm it is a signifcant increase on the natural level of 750%.
  Therefore whilst the poster above may believe they are fluoride free and technically they are probably wrong, the assumption that the level is significantly smaller and therefore acceptable is probably understandable.
  https://www.dwi.gov.uk/consumer/conce...uoridemaps.pdf
  RO removes 95% plus of fluoride - Therefore anything under 1ppm is going to be reduced to levels of 0.05ppm or even less.
  As I said, choice is the key here - other options for artificial fluoridation exist (some countries add it to table salt and the like), but frankly brushing your teeth is really the best option - and to be honest that can involve using fluoridated or non-fluoridated toothpastes (and again is down to choice).
  It boils down to education. One thing I have to say against fluoridation is it will never replace good oral hygeine or regular visits to the dentist - if you live where I do then this can be upto a 60 mile trip each way (and I don't live in the middle of nowhere I assure you). It's about getting the basics right, but this rings true of a nanny state cost saving operation frankly, and I can understand why people have concerns.