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Comment by arbuge | Hacker News Reader

Wouldn't that result in the ingestion of a large quantity of toothpaste over the course of a lifetime? I can't imagine that would be good for you.

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It's just diatoms. We all eat all sorts of things and it's fine for the most part. As long as you aren't eating actual poison you are fine.

Fluoride is toxic.

> We all eat all sorts of things and it's fine That's like saying you can lose some IQ every so often because you'll live so what

Safe: 10 mg/day

Toothpaste: 4mg / teaspoon

So you'd need to swallow several whole teaspoons to pass std. safety levels

cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluoride

Safe, means it won't have any detrimental effects, or it won't be debilitating, or it won't kill me?

That's a good question. Having not seen reliable research on that point, my approach is as follows: I use a small amount of toothpaste (say, 1/4th of what you see in ads or less) and I spit excess. In this way in the worst scenario I digest at least one order of magnitude less fluoride than the threshold of the safe amount.

Now I am fairly certain I probably use more than that even, but with the complexity of biological systems it might be as well saying that being shot with 10 bullets is somehow better than with 1000 bullets.

I just point that out, because I am acutely aware how good people are at convincing themselves with statistics of anything, really.

You are actually being hit a lot more by cosmic rays that are not deflected by our atmosphere. We survive this fine. This is probably a more acurate simile than the bullet one, based on the amounts involved.

lol. You're comparing toothpaste to getting shot 10 times?

Yes that is better than getting shot 1000 times, not better than getting shot only once, in case you are wondering.

Complexity != Fragile

The lethal dose is 5-10 grams, the recommended safe dose is 10 milligrams maximum. Between those points you'll experience some pain and stomach discomfort. Regularly going over the safe dose may cause some organ issues.

Basically, even if you swallow all your toothpaste you're unlikely to have problems unless your diet is already rich in fluoride, and spitting but not rinsing is fine.

Toothpaste contains a fluoride molecule, not direct fluoride. Not the same thing at all.

We drink Fluoide in the water.

"The dose makes the poison." Even ionizing radiation (sunlight) in small doses over a whole lifetime isn't really harmful. Especially given that it's how we naturally make vitamin D.

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