"Not sure what kind of soap you would ever be using to substitute toothpaste."

Most commercial soaps include petroleum products, I've heard.

Many people brush their teeth with pure Castile soap, like Dr. Bronner's (the only one I can find around here).

From Wikipedia (yes, I know): "Defluoridation is needed when the naturally occurring fluoride level exceeds recommended limits. It can be accomplished by percolating water through granular beds of activated alumina, bone meal, bone char, or tricalcium phosphate; by coagulation with alum; or by precipitation with lime.[5]

"Pitcher or faucet-mounted water filters do not alter fluoride; the more-expensive reverse osmosis filters remove 65–95% of fluoride, and distillation filters remove all fluoride.[7]"

Lack of fluoride is probably more of a nutritional problem, but America certainly isn't going to admit THAT!

Sue

Excluding the ubiquitous conspiracy sites and sources, and blathering from people who have no knowledge or understanding beyond hearsay and conjecture I can't find much evidence behind that claim.

Do you have any reliable, preferably experimentally backed, source for those claims?

I made a New Year's resolution to not use the words "tinfoil hat." I am mustering all my discipline. Nope, not talking about tinfoil hats, no way.

How was the human race able to survive all these centuries without having extra fluoride being added to the drinking water ?

The human race was doing just fine without extra fluoride in the drinking water, until some genius came along and drew up a bunch of spurious "reasons" for doing it.

At least the Europeans know better.

I too would like to see verifiable proof. My entire life, every city I have lived in has added fluoride to the water. So by BigCityHillbilly's response/analogy, I should be dumber then a 8 day old stale cracker. Then again, I did well in school and college and now have a line of work where dumb is not an option nor an excuse....but who knows, maybe I just hide the dumbness well.

Flouride was added to water to prevent Dental Caries, so was probably added to help sell the vast quantities of High Fructose Corn Syrup, phosphoric and citric acid used in the North American diet without everyones teeth rotting out.

As for the hard core commie conspiracy the little blue pill so popular with American organised crime Spammers (no doubt working tirelessly for the Pharma companies) is the modern day antidote.

Americans are in very bad shape in comparison to the people of most other civilized countries. We are suffering from very poor health and we are doing very poorly in many other ways.

I'm not trying to say that fluoride is responsible for the mess that we're in, but it definitely hasn't helped. Fluoridation has NOT been successful at staving off the myriad of health problems that Americans are suffering from. Adding fluoride to the drinking water is similar in many ways to insisting on universal circumcision for all babies. It would be wise to place the burden of proof on the ones who are making these impositions and not on those who object to them. BTW, I have seen a few scientific articles which debunk the gratuitous reasons that various "experts" have cited for adding this industrial waste into our drinking water.

Which industrial process creates the Fluoride?

I was under the impression that the Fluoride production was a byproduct of the Nuclear processing industry (Uranium Hexafluoride) to produce weapons grade Uranium 235 along with the other byproduct of depleted Uranium. Teflon a long chain Fluoride plastic was also developed for gas storage vessel linings for the UF6.

The toxic byproduct of the nuclear arms industry has to be disposed of somewhere I guess.

One of the things you notice in prehistoric skeletons is the presence of very poor dental health - there are variations and exceptions, depending on time and place, but very often by the time you hit forty, your teeth were likely to be toast.

"The human race was doing just fine" as a population, but individual life expectancy was remarkably short - I believe it was something like 49 years or so in mid-nineteenth century in the USA. Back in the Pleistocene, I believe you kicked off in your 30s.

You asked a question about finding a filter that would handle fluoride, and I believe you got an answer. Why you would want such an item is your business and none of my own..

Agreed.