Need a portable water filter that removes flouride

Re: the "first need" water purifier that's produced by General Ecology.

It's a misnomer to call this gadget a 'water purifier' because it doesn't remove any flouride. OK, so it does remove chlorine and all kinds of other stuff from the tap water .... but it still isn't satisfactory as far as I'm concerned, given that flouride is a serious poison, is known to have many harmful effects, and is even listed as a poisonous compound in most European countries. I've been searching around in the hope of finding something like the "first need" but which is better than the "first need" because it also removes flouride. I've seen all kinds of water purification units on the market that remove flouride, but the one that I'm looking for has got to be a portable unit so as to fit the lifestyle of a vagabond like myself who is constantly moving around from place to place. L.W.

That would be an interesting find since "portable" and "flouride removal" are not typically compatible. Maybe a lifeboat reverse osmosis unit would do the trick, but that's awfully expensive.

If you can go as large as one of the Berkey models, they do make a flouride-removing PF-2 cartridge. But that needs to be used in addition to one of their standard black ones, to get the full range of water purification.

Are we talking for daily use, or just emergencies? I've never done the calculation, but you may find that finding bottled water without added flouride is more economical than fitering, even over the long term, especially if you're just concerned with drinking/cooking water, and not including bathing/showering water.

I had discussed this with a friend,of whom works at The Poop Soup Plant(Hyperion Treatment Plant).He said Distillation should do the trick as,It depletes the water's ability to contain Minerals in Evaporation.I asked if Flouride is a Mineral?He said,Originally Yes,but more like a salt.He said 3-cycles of Distillation,Should do the trick you should have 99.9% pure H20! So I guess a Still would be the answer,instead of a plant base,you just use Water! Hope this helps!

I take it you don't use toothpaste?

-john

FWIW, some toothpaste makers currently offer flouride free toothpaste. Trader Joes brand and Tom's of Maine are the two I've seen.

Based on science, a little Flouride is beneficial.....and a lot will kill you. The same can be said for most biologically beneficial elements/substances. Too much H2O ingested WILL kill you. Without it you become a pile of powder and bones.
Most people realize flouride (Fl)is beneficial to our teeth, especially during formation. Fl is VERY beneficial to bones when present in small amounts (~1.PPM)especially when they are formed.The benefit? Increased resiliency. In a complete absence of Fl bones are brittle. With Fl @ formation of the bone they bend and flex to a more than just 'statistically significant' greater degree. Without (in the absence of all)Fl bones break rather than flex.
It probably doesn't directly affect most forum members since few are 'old timers', but very low dosage Fl helps reduce/slow osteoporosis.

It also has other uses and benefits, but minor by comparison.

Throwing some science your way.....Take it or leave it as you wish.

gimpy

While I personally think fluoridation provides a net public health benefit, people can choose to ingest less if they so desire (provided that they are not harming the health of themselves or their families).

In areas where naturally occurring fluoride levels are too high, an "activated alumina defluoridation filter" is used. This is not a portable solution.

As I understand it, reverse osmosis removes a large percentage of fluoride. And just about every grocery store has a fill-your-own-jug unit. So, for a traveller, filling a few handy-sized jugs for drinking and making tea would be pretty easy.

It never made any sense to add fluoride to the water supply for the ostensible reason of tooth decay prevention. If you want to use fluoride as an oral hygiene aid, you can always rinse your mouth with it, but that's no reason to ingest flouride into your body ! This chemical is known to dumb people down. It has known adverse effects on the central nervous system with prolonged use.

I suspect that the REAL reasons for adding fluoride to the water supply are totally different from the stated reasons.

I don't use toothpaste.

Soap is a good substitute for toothpaste.

Not sure what kind of soap you would ever be using to substitute toothpaste. You may want to research some of the ingredients that goes into the soap making process. Most of the chemicals were never meant for oral mouth hygiene and I would hazard to say (no pun intended) that these ingredients are more hazardous to your wellbeing then Fluoride ever would be...

"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.

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.

http://www2.fluoridealert.org/Alert/China/Fluoride-in-Water-Linked-to-Lower-IQ-in-Children

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.

What reason would it be?

Besides the mentioned benefits of more decay resistant teeth AND bones being able to flex instead of fracture AND Osteoporosis treatment.....
'Optimal' Fl level when teeth are formed makes teeth more abrasion resistant through life. Topical (rinse/gel/toothpaste) Fl helps with abrasion resistance, too, but if you only use topical, how often do we use it?...... I can't stand at the sink all day.....
Topical use of Fl helps fight gum disease (periodontal disease)also.
As medicine for osteoporosis it must be taken systemically.....(HORRORS!), but studies are currently being done on the Fl generation (kids in the 1950s)to see if osteoporosis is reduced in elder years with Fl use in youth. Epidemiological studies take lots of time and numbers to be beyond distortion of conclusions.

Yes, the recommended level has been/is being reduced by the powers that be to 0.7 ppm. Some kids drink a LOT of water and frozen juice reconstituted with water etc, and others hardly any water, so dosage IS difficult by water supply. Note that the only 'damage' was small white spots on the teeth that the parents of 'perfect' children have trouble dealing with. On the brite side, more of the positive benefits are there until 2x rec dose some enamel damage does occur.

I think some of the quote might have gotten scrambled, but I have to agree that Fl in teeth has no benefit before eruption of those teeth.

I'll not bang this gong further. However I will say that xylitol gum/candy used regularly by persons of ALL ages CAN benefit with cavity/decay reduction. Europe HAS done a better job of using that to fight decay than the US has. I pat them on the back. I see both being FAR better than either/or.

gimpy

PS:xylitol can be searched on the web.

Also sticking with the OP's original question:

1) Use an unfluoridated source - rainfall, stream, spring, or other "natural" source - just be sure your source is pathogen free.

2) With a problem of this magnitude, surely there must be a commercial source offering "poison free" water. If not, someone is missing a bet....

3) Move to Haiti. I don't know, but I'll bet their water is not fluoridated. If that is not the case, there are probably other countries that would fit the bill

Many countries don't have Fluoridated water. I don't think its a question of whether the country is a developed or an underdeveloped country. Perhaps its more a question of choice. When asked if consumers wanted Fluoridation of water or not, the water consumer will mostly reject the idea as they do not want to receive mass medicated/poisoned/tainted water.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluoridation_by_country

BTW I don't think I have ever had Fluoridated water except when staying with relatives in England (an area which apparently had Fluoridated water according to the Wiki article), the taste of the water was pretty rank (grey scum formed inside the tea cup), but this may have been down to other impurities (I always seemed to also suffered considerable leg cramps when sleeping, which I put down to the disgusting water only when visiting). Is there a major difference in taste between Fluoridated water and the real stuff?

Just for yuks --

Looks like Flouride levels in my state are between .8 an 1.5 mg/L.

http://www.doh.wa.gov/ehp/dw/fluoride-data.xls

"The World Health Organization recommends a guideline maximum fluoride value of 1.5 mg/L as a level at which fluorosis should be minimal.[59]"

"the only clear adverse effect is dental fluorosis, which can alter the appearance of children's teeth during tooth development; this is mostly mild and is unlikely to represent any real effect on aesthetic appearance or on public health.[10]"

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_fluoridation#Safety)

-john

Nope, grew up drinking water directly from an Alaskan stream. The water here is just fine, flouride and all.

"real stuff" -- you crack me up. :-)

-john

I suspect that as city councils look to cost-shifting to mitigate their considerable budget woes, they will become less concerned about the nebulous cost of cavities and more concerned with the demonstrable cost of chemicals, treatment plants, haz-mat disposal, and water plant maintenance workers and their pensions.
http://www.newmediaexplorer.org/chris/Clinch_2010_Costs_Artificial_Water_Fluoridation.pdf

I don't mean to belabor the point, however I wanted to correct what I think was an incorrect statement I made earlier when I said that not enough research has been done. Actually, it's more accurate to say that not enough research has been published.

After researching some more, it appears that there has been a lot of research done on human exposure to fluoride since the 40's and 50's, however, we are not entitled to see the results. Much government research is still classified and results of industry-sponsored research (remember, tons of fluoride are produced by industry) are proprietary and not published. And this includes low dose research, not just highly toxic amounts.

A chilling exposé on the topic of government research into fluoride is Fluoride, Teeth, and the Atomic Bomb .

That piece also sheds some light on Chaosmagnet's question about what other reason could there be to fluoridate water in the first place other than the innocent objective of helping prevent cavities.