Yes.We should stop putting poisonous chlorine on our food too. Not only that, it comes attached to sodium, which is so reactive that it bursts into flame on contact with air. Just to be safe, you should get rid of all the sodium and chloride in your body.
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And whether it has a toxic effect of any significance at low enough concentrations.
And of course, it’s lifetime in the body.
Yes there are all sorts of questions that determine whether and to what extend a potentially toxic compound has toxic bodily effects. Of course any of these compounds are basic elements found in the Earth’s crust, and so in small quantities will exist in any food you eat no matter how natural and organic and clean it might be. The question is at what concentration it starts to have a measurable negative effect, and whether that negative effect is offset by other positive effects it has.
I some times might take an aspirin to alleviate a migraine, knowing full well that salicylic acid have certain potentially adverse effects on the body.
There might not be a “need” for it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea.
And yet you will happily ingest sodium chloride, or brush your teeth with flouride-containing toothpaste.
But your argument here is of no value scientifically. The “similar” reactivity because they are both in the same group in the periodic table is the same argument used by Felicia Wolfe Simon to support the inference that arsenic could take the place of phosphorous in the backbone of DNA when she and her team first claimed to have found microorganisms with arsenic-containing DNA. And yet the claim was false, and despite both elements having “similar” chemical properties, there were good reasons to think arsenic could not just substitute for phosphorous in the backbone of DNA.
Similar =/= identical, the differences really mattered.
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Would you recommend dissolving salicylic acid in your water and drinking 8 glasses a day for your entire life?
I’m confused. Which thread should I reply on?
All I am saying is that I personally don’t think people should be almost literally force fed fluoride in their water. As a chemist, I don’t know, doesn’t fluoride in water dissolve, thus ionizing and becoming fluorine? I actually don’t know, but it certainly seems that it would, especially in low concentrations in water.
Things I am not saying: RFK, Jr. should be anywhere near a government position, or even allowed to drive a car.
However, my understanding of this is that it’s a recommendation and has no legal force.
I’m unsure why people were replying to you on the other thread after I moved your post here. All the replies should now be in the same place.
Fluoride is already an ion (“an inorganic, monatomic anion of fluorine”, specifically). So no it cannot ionise. Also, as fluorine is, as you have previously noted, highly reactive, it is quite difficult (and requires quite a bit of energy) to turn fluoride back into fluorine.
It has been forty years since I studied chemistry – but I’m fairly certain that these facts should be blindingly obvious to anybody with even the most basic understanding of the topic.
I would suggest that a stronger understanding of these basics might be helpful before attempting to further engage in this topic.
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You really shouldn’t expose your ignorance of basic chemistry in so public a way. Chloride and fluoride are ions. Chlorine and fluorine are the neutral elements. The reason the elements are so reactive is that they desperately want to complete their outer electron shells by taking an electron from somewhere else. Once they do that they aren’t very reactive any more. You are not equipped to discuss fluoridation, and you should stop now.
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I’m all for “free thought”. My concern is when uninformed free thought starts controlling public policy—and thereby harms others.
Perhaps there are people who think that they are being “force fed” chlorine (same column of the Periodic Table as fluorine) by their municipal water supplies. The alternative is going back to the days when it is was horrendously common for disease outbreaks from bacterial (and even amoebic) contamination to sicken and kill massive numbers of people. The death and suffering was devastating.
So, as always, it is a matter of concentrations and a matter of relative risk. If you think that the scientists and their many decades of data have it wrong and you are certain that chlorine levels and fluoride levels need to be further adjusted, compile the data and publish a compelling peer-reviewed scientific paper.
And while you are at it, people are being “force fed” all sorts of substances which are added without their permission or approval to all sorts of foods they depend on. There are countless such substances. Some have solid science behind them, such as the tremendous improvements in public health which came with adding particular vitamins and minerals to staple foods like bread (B vitamins and folic acid demolished a lot of malnutrition), milk (Vitamin D virtually eliminated rickets) and salt (iodine addressed goiter.) Other substances added to ultra-processed foods have been devastating----here I’m thinking of sugar and salt being added in massive quantities to almost everything. All sorts of metabolic diseases and dangerous obesity result. (Sometimes I have a very difficult time finding canned tomato puree without sugar and sea salt being added, as just one example.)
I wish Kennedy would campaign against those later dangerous substances being virtually “force fed” to Americans. It is common for the unadulterated alternatives to be FAR more expensive than the product that is filled with extra sugar and salt. People of modest income have a difficult time affording the “luxury” of avoiding those added substances. They are being “force fed.”)
We KNOW—the data is incontrovertible—that the addition of sugar in massive quantities to virtually every processed food in a grocery store is causing disease, disability, and death. It poses a much greater threat than fluoridated water. Why is RFK Jr. silent on this problem?
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You claim to be a chemist and ask that?
That’s obvious. But the question is why don’t you know something that basic?
It doesn’t seem that way at all.
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Did you mean “as someone who is largely ignorant of chemistry”? Because you seem to know no more about it than you did about the history of the Establishment Clause.
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Hi Allen
Here is a discussion RFK jr had on YouTube regarding the problem with processed foods. His position becomes clear in the first 10 minutes.
It will do that, the same way that table salt in water ionizes into Sodium and Chlorine. Drinking large amounts of concentrated salt water is bad for you, and the same is probably true about drinking water with large amounts of Fluoride (I haven’t tried it). BUT small amounts of salt are no problem, and the same is true of Fluoride. A Fluorine ion (F-) doesn’t stay freely available for very long it binds to something else. From what I’ve read, Fluorine “doesn’t want to exist” in pure form; It will quickly bind to something else, which makes it useful for re-mineralizing teeth that have lost their enamel.
Chemist Derek Lowe has a series of blog posts about things you really don’t want to do with Fluorine. This is scary stuff, but all of these posts deal with highly reactive and unstable forms of Fluorine in concentration, not the stuff we put in toothpaste.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/things-i-won-t-work-dioxygen-difluoride
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I will pose a question that I am almost certain every single one of you will ignore and focus on the fact that I mixed up fluorine and fluoride.
Supposing you do some research and find out that your locality does NOT put fluorine in public water (many already don’t). Would you yourself go out and buy it and put in in all of your own drinking water yourself? Or would you maybe figure brushing your teeth twice a day covers it?
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Microdosing that into every glass of water would be annoying, so I probably wouldn’t. But if I had a good way to add it where the line enters my house I probably would. Mostly, if we didn’t have fluoridated water I would be writing to the City to ask why not. You are probably too young to remember, but in the old days, Crest commercials featured a kid coming home from the dentist: “mommy, mommy! I only got ONE cavity!”
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Yes, we all jumped on you because fluorine gas and fluoride salts are very very different chemically – and therefore mixing them up demonstrated an ignorance of basic chemistry.
I would suggest that this would be impractical to do individually, because it would involve:
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Finding a source of fluoride salts, purchasing them and storing them.
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Measuring and mixing the appropriate concentration of fluoride and water.
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Storing the resultant mixture until needed.
That the benefit of fluoridation is sufficiently small that it fails a cost-benefit for all this does not mean that it lacks benefit.
The issue is economies of scale in doing it for an entire water reticulation system.
The same argument holds for iodized salt. It would be prohibitively expensive for people to dose table salt individually – so it is done during manufacture.
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In other words rather than admit that your objections were based on gross errors you’ll ask a largely irrelevant question.
As others have answered the reason for not doing it is the massive inconvenience and low benefit for a single household. Dosing the supply is far less inconvenient and has far greater reach.
We certainly wouldn’t refuse to do it based on imaginary dangers or a desire for dental decay.
A more relevant question would be “if you lived in a region where natural fluoride levels in water were low, would you support adding fluoride to bring it up to the recommended dose?” Which I think would get rather more “yes” votes.
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No, for the same reasons that, if my government had not built highways connecting all the major cities in my province, I wouldn’t go out and build them to the cities I am likely to visit.
That doesn’t mean that I don’t agree with having those highways, nor that I wouldn’t object if someone decided to tear them all down.
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Rather than this irrelevant question, let’s get back to the your profound ignorance of chemistry, ironically displayed in the sentence inexplicably beginning “As a chemist…”. That’s much more relevant.
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You didn’t merely mix up fluorine and fluoride, because flipping them doesn’t make your statements correct. You expressed a lack of understanding of very basic chemistry.
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Maybe we can clear up this one, simple question: Are you a chemist?
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