re: having bad teeth and/or losing your teeth. Was this problem largely the result of not ingesting enough fluoride into the body ? A more likely scenario is that people in prehistoric times were so busy trying to survive that they simply didn't have enough time for engaging in tooth-preservation activities.

Fluoride began to be added when it was observed that that kids living in communities with higher amounts of fluoride occurring in the drinking water had far fewer cavities than kids in communities with lower concentrations of fluoride.

Dentists and public health officials began to educate politicians and citizenry about this, and advocate for adding fluoride to the drinking water.

Imagine, dentists trying to accomplish something whose result would cut into their income: fewer teeth to drill and fill, or pull.

They succeeded in many areas, with a huge drop in the incidence of dental caries resulting, in those areas where fluoride has been added to the public drinking water.

At those concentrations, there is no reputable evidence that it causes cancer or any other undesirable outcomes, with the exception of rare dental fluorosis, which, again, is due to inadvertently getting too much fluoride.

The reason to put it in the drinking water is to get the fluoride incorporated into the baby teeth, but more importantly, into the permanent teeth, while they are developing. Applying fluoride to the outside of the teeth at the dentist's office, or with tooth-paste, seems to be less effective than if the fluoride is distributed through-out the tooth. Both processes seem better than either by itself, however.

As has been mentioned, a quick definition of a poison is "too much."

Too much of any good and necessary thing will shorten your life. Water is just one. Breathing 100% oxygen, which is absolutely required at the 21% concentration in our atmosphere, does bad things eventually to your eyes for example. 100% O2 for too long is too much of an otherwise good and necessary thing.
Ditto for fluoride. A very little is great; too much ranges from bad to very bad, again, depending on how much.

I want water !

Give me water.

I don't want any toxic crap in my water !

The British National Health System Homeopathic Accident and Emergency Hospital Departments couldn't possibly function with US style water Fluoridation.

I'm having a difficult time understanding why people would want to drink water that's been poisoned with toxic chemicals.

There is also plenty of documented "science" - now long-since debunked - which claims that pre-frontal lobotomies are harmless and that they were mostly beneficial to their victims.

The real issue is that many just don't get a choice of whether they do or do not get poisoned/medicated with Fluoride as Fluoride is available in toothpaste if required (and mostly spat out rather than be absorbed into bone and tissue) and reducing the consumption of tooth rotting food and drink, which is the real issue for Dental caries prevention.

I saw that press release when it first came out, too. Unfortunately, that particular paper has since been withdrawn.

But there are multiple citations here regarding flouride and the brain. Anyone who wants to do some reading, knock yourself out. At least a half dozen of the human research papers can be accessed online, without visiting your friendly neighborhood university school library.

Here is the 2006 report by a committee of the National Research Council, an arm of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, on flouride in drinking water. Regarding neurotoxic effects, the committee stated:



Do these papers "prove" anything about flouride's effect on the brain? Well, it's still too early to say, but even the NRC is saying that it looks like there might be something to it, so we should investigate. There is still much, much more research to be done on flouride, even though we've been adding it to our water supply for 50-60 years. I get the impression that there has been far more research into BPA's effects than flouride so far, so there's a lot that we still don't understand. However, although the jury is still out on BPA, we have steadily seen more and more restrictions on BPA as more science comes out against it. In fact, the Dept of Health and Human Services just came out and recommended lowering the level of flouride in drinking water from a range of 0.7 to 1.2 ppm to just a straight 0.7 ppm--the first change to the recommendation since the 60's, I believe. However, it's still up to the EPA to make the final decision on whether to lower the current 4 ppm maximum limit.

I don't know about the Commie angle, but the potential health effects of flouride are far from tin foil hat territory.

Oh, another interesting (and disturbing) brain angle with flouride is that it can release large amounts of aluminum, like when boiling flouridated water in aluminum cookware. There was one study that demonstrated that 1 ppm of flouride could release 200 ppm of aluminum (sorry, I forget the citation). Alzheimer's is becoming more common (faster than the population is aging) and aluminum exposure has been linked to it, so it makes you wonder...

Unfortunately, from what I have read in the past, most government agencies and panels only talk about two particular health problems--dental and skeletal flourosis. They totally ignore even mentioning other potential problems that scientists have found.

Sticking with the OP question, according to this site:



If it is important for you to filer out fluoride on the go, it sounds to me like an HTI filter such as the Lifepack is the closest you'll get. It is a forward osmosis system, which is said to provide filtration comparable to reverse osmosis.

One of the downsides is that you don't end up with water but rather a sports drink solution. If you really want to be in control of the ingredients used you can apparently make your own salt/sugar solution, as stated here:



A fun little fact about this system is that it will filter out close to 90% of urine salts, and has been credited with saving lives in this manner. The story is mentioned in this article.

No affiliation with HTI or any of the linked websites. I've not even tried said product and this information is gleaned from the Internet only, so take it with a few grains of salt.

I believe that this is outdated thinking about the action of flouride on dental health.

In the CDC's 2001 Recommendations for Using Fluoride to Prevent and Control Dental Caries in the United States report, it states that:



If flouride's benefit is primarily from topical exposure (like toothpaste, flouride rinses, gels/foams at the dentist's office, etc.), then the argument goes that we shouldn't be forced to swallow it and be exposed to the risks without any alternative.