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Comment by Drdrdrq | Hacker News Reader

Crazies or people who actually care about environment? Fluorinating water must be one of the least efficient ways of doing this.

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If you'll coordinate an effort to get florinated products into the hands of everyone in the US who can't afford them, I'll agree with you.

Like toothpaste? You actually think it's easier/cheaper to put it in the entire water supply vs handing out some free toothpaste?

Toothpaste isn't free. Producing toothpaste, putting flouride in it, and distributing it are all harder than putting fluoride in water and distributing it. Water is pumped to people's houses from central locations. Toothpaste has to be placed in tubes and shipped around on boats and trucks.

The reason foridation has additional FDA requirements is because it's essentially a medicine, not a food supplement like iodine - which is an essential nutrient. So to justify the medication of entire communities at the exact same dose of a non-essential pharmacological product in an effort to ensure poor people receive enough flouride seems misguided. Calcium has a similar hardening effect on teeth and is present in water already - forming the scale you see in the shower Ca(CO3). Additionally, flouride stains your teeth [0].

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dental_fluorosis

Hard water has calcium and soft water doesn't. My city gets naturally soft water and we don't get scale. But we do get added fluoride.

> Crazies or people who actually care about environment?

The environment???

Fluoride, like many minerals, is naturally occurring in many water sources, just not (all) of the ones that are used for drinking water. Additionally, the concentration of fluoride for this purpose is minuscule (0.7 mg/L according to Health Canada).

This comment is why you absolutely must test well water every 2-3 years.

Up here in Maine we have a pretty bad fluoride issue in some areas, and a lot of people are not testing their well water, and ending up with fluoride poisoning.

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