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Is there any proof that the amount of fluoride that commonly used in toothpaste is unhealthy?

Oddthinking
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Christian
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  • *Fluorine* or *Fluoride*? – Dori Mar 15 '11 at 23:56
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    Everything that contains fluoride necessarily contain fluorine. – Christian Mar 16 '11 at 00:54
  • My point is that the two terms are being used interchangeably between the question and its answer(s), so standardization might benefit the question. Also, we have tags for [fluoridation](http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fluoridation) and [fluorosis](http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fluorosis), and it seems to me that people searching for those would want to find this question as well. – Dori Mar 16 '11 at 01:10
  • You know you're not supposed to ingest toothpaste, right? – Django Reinhardt May 25 '13 at 03:42
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    @Christian Yes, sort of, but a distracting "clarification". The chemical form will be *fluoride* and that matters a lot. Same way that saying common table salt contains *chlorine* is really not helpful: it contains *chloride*. Chloride is essential for bodily function, chlorine not so much. – matt_black Jun 22 '15 at 16:41
  • Answers to [Is fluoride an ingredient in Prozac and rat poison?](http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/q/26978/2703) describe how toxic it is in theory, and how many people are poisoned poisoned by it in practice. – ChrisW Jun 22 '15 at 21:38
  • I think this question is too broad. In what sense do you mean "unhealthy?" There are wide claims about fluoride, from acute poisoning (i.e. if you eat an entire tube of toothpaste), to long-term effects after low-doses of exposure (i.e. normal tooth brushing for 50 years). Which are you interested in? I think it would be easier to answer this question if you quoted a _specific claim_ of harm caused by fluoride. – Flimzy Jul 14 '18 at 16:37

1 Answers1

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Fluoride Alert is an anti-fluoridation group and has no credibility in the scientific community.

The fluoride in toothpaste has a concentration of 1,000 to 1,500 ppm of fluoride (which is considerably higher than fluoridated water at 0.7 ppm). A small child would need to eat approximate two tubes of toothpaste in order to become seriously ill. However, the other ingredients would cause vomiting long before a dangerous amount was ingested. As for fluorosis, dentist recommend that very young children be given a pea-sized bit of toothpaste on their brush and instructed to spit out the toothpaste. This precaution is so that the child can avoid getting mild to very mild fluorosis, a purely cosmetic effect in which very tiny, snowflake-like spots develop on the surface of the teeth. It is actually an indication that the teeth are especially resistant to decay. The CDC website has photos of various stages of fluorosis. Moderate to serious fluorosis appears to occur more from drinking private well water with very high levels of fluoride.

Sources:

Institute for Science in Medicine: http://www.scienceinmedicine.org/policy/statements/fluoridation.pdf

For children under 2 years of age, refer to the CDC's advice:

http://www.cdc.gov/fluoridation/safety/dental_fluorosis.htm

Linda Rosa
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    Just a caveat that other home fluoride dental treatments may be fatally toxic to children: [source](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1752-7325.1997.tb02966.x/abstract) – Oddthinking Dec 30 '12 at 03:59
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    "Fluoride Alert is an anti-fluoridation group and has no credibility in the scientific community." -- Citation required... and... is this relevant? Fluoride Alert is essentially a fluoride-centric news outlet (with an obvious bias). But news outlets not having "scientific credibility" really isn't news, or relevant. – Flimzy Jul 14 '18 at 16:35