“What is That Stuff Fluoride?”
Recently, I read an article on fluoride. This article told me everything that I needed to know about fluoride, but I had to visit other sites as well. I learned many good and some bad things about fluoride. We were told to answer some questions as well.
Many people disapprove of adding fluoride to drinking water because when it is in high levels it causes brown stains to appear on a person’s teeth. Frederick S. Mckay had just started dental practice when he discovered this. After research, scientists were able to find that fluoride levels in water below 1 ppm won’t stain your teeth, but will prevent decay on your teeth.
I am against adding fluoride to our drinking water because you can put infants at risk of becoming sick. There are other ways to take fluoride safely. In fact, I don’t think that the fluoride would make that big of a change and I doubt that it will be any different from the water we drink now. The only upside to having it in the water is that it will strengthen your teeth. This isn’t very convincing to me. I am more convinced that people will be harmed if we add it to our water.
The technological advances that had to be made before fluoride could be widely used in toothpaste and mouthwashes were found through many scientific tests. First, we had to figure out how much fluoride could be introduced to the toothpaste or mouthwas so that it wouldn’t stain our teeth. This was a very important step because it has to be enough to prevent decay, but it has to be the right amount so that it won’t stain our teeth. Basically you have to pair the fluoride with compatible abrasive. This is similar to finding a compatible match on a dating site. You want the perfect person so that nothing goes wrong. You wouldn’t want the abrasive you paired fluoride with to be a horrible match and ruin everything. Sodium- Fluoride was the abrasive used in early toothpastes. I used to think that toothpaste was so simple, just gel in a bottle. I was wrong because there is so much more to toothpaste, mouthwash as well.
The side effects that are of the least concern to me are that it will taste funny and it could stain your teeth if they add too much fluoride to the water. I would be so mad if the fluoride water stained my teeth because even though it is still preventing decay, it has ruined my teeth’s color. The taste isn’t that important, but it is a somewhat bland taste. The side effect that is of most concern to me is the cancer. This is a scary battle and no one would want to go through this. Also, they said that babies shouldn’t have fluoride water, so we are in part endangering our community.
I got all this information at: http://pubs.acs.org/cen/whatstuff/stuff/7916sci4.html
http://www.fluoridealert.org/fluoride-facts.htm
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