What Are The Long-Term Effects Of Ingesting Fluorides On Our Bones?

One of the longest-running controversies in public health is the addition of fluorides to municipal water supplies, a process that occurs all over the world, in numerous different places. Once considered an essential nutrient, fluorine is now recognized as a potential problem for maintaining healthy bones and teeth. The simple fact is that small amounts of fluorine in the form of fluorides helps to prevent cavities in the teeth, but larger amounts can of fluoride cause a range of detrimental effects of varying severity that depend on individual genetics factor.

Fluorides Are Everywhere

Fluorine is a highly reactive, corrosive gas in its chemically combined state. The gas is so chemically active that it quickly forms fluorides with metals, and these fluorides are stable enough to find their way into the food and water supply.

Even if you don't live in a community that uses fluoridation in its water supply, there is no escaping fluorides. A fluoride compound called cryolite is commonly used to make aluminum and as a pesticide. Another fluoride compound, which is known as sulfur hexafluoride, is used as an insulator in electrical transformers. And a third fluoride compound known as polytetrafluoroethylene serves as the building block of Teflon, the non-stick coating that appears on everything from pots and pans to artificial hips. Fluoride can be found in your daily environment in abundance, in other words, but the story doesn't end there.

Fluorides Occur Naturally in Food

We usually think of fluoride as a compound we get from drinking water or stannous fluoride toothpaste, but there is also fluoride in food and beverages. Most foods contain just a trace of fluorides, only 5 to 50 micrograms per 100-gram serving, but some foods contain much more than that. For example:

• Tea (iced or hot), not decaffeinated, contains 302-389 micrograms of fluoride per 100 gram serving.
• Raisins have 234 micrograms of fluoride per 100 gram serving
• Tea (iced or hot), decaffeinated has 220 micrograms of fluoride per 100 gram serving. (The process of removing caffeine also removes fluorides.)
• Canned crab has 210 micrograms of fluoride per 100 gram serving.
• White wine will give you 202 micrograms of fluoride per 100 gram serving.
• McDonald's French fries contain 115 micrograms of fluoride in each 100 gram serving.
• Red wine has 105 micrograms of fluoride per 100 gram serving.

Powdered coffee creamer is also high in fluoride content, although most people use only a very small amount.

Are Fluorides Good for Human Health?

While scientists have concluded that fluorides are not an "essential nutrient," they are sufficiently useful for preventing cavities that in 1997 the Food and Nutrition Board of the US Institute of Medicine recommended a daily dose of 0.01 mg (for infants) to 4.0 mg (for adults) for good dental health. The reason fluorides are helpful in preventing tooth decay is that they activate genes in teeth and bones that power a process called osteoclastogenesis.

This hard-to-pronounce term refers to the creation of "clean up" cells in bones and teeth that break down old bone and tooth tissue so it can be replaced by new healthy cells. This enables the bones and teeth to repair tiny, invisible microfractures that otherwise would lead to a break over time. Too much fluoride, however, leads to too many osteoclasts, and deformities in bones and teeth.

What Can Go Wrong With Fluoride Supplementation?

The basic problem with the use of fluorides for bone health is that more bone is not necessarily better bone. Treating bones with the compound sodium fluoride, for example, increases the volume of a bone, but without "connecting" the new bone tissue to old bone tissue. This produces a new site for a potential fracture, or broken bone.

Even worse, a combination of fluorides and aluminum compounds (and remember, one of the biggest sources of fluorides in our environment is cryolite, which is used in the making of aluminum) "turns off" the osteoblasts, the cells that create the new bone or tooth enamel after it has been broken down by the osteoclasts.

Mottled Teeth, Knotty Bones

We aren't aware of what's going on with our bones, of course, until a bone breaks. It is a lot easier to detect changes in teeth, whether just by looking or because we are diligent about going to the dentist for routine checkups twice a year.

Many communities in North America and China have naturally occurring high levels fluoride in their drinking water. In these communities, many people develop a condition called dental fluorosis. The teeth repair the damage done by the overactive osteoclasts by creating brown, lumpy, mottled, unsightly crystals.

These teeth don't just look bad. They also tend to break off, requiring constant trips to the dentist to get crowns. And they are just a hint of what can be going on in the bones.

What You Can Do to Avoid Excessive Fluorides

In the communities in the US where the drinking water is contaminated with fluorides, far more fluorides than in the drinking water in towns and cities that fluoridate their water, people drink bottled water. But if you can't afford bottled water, here are some suggestions.

• Drink mineral water. The calcium and magnesium in mineral water combine with the fluorides in tap water so they are not absorbed through the small intestine.
• Use real milk, cream, or half-and-half rather than powdered creamer in your coffee. The "real thing" is lower in fluorides, and also helps bind fluorides from other sources.
• Go ahead and use fluoride toothpaste. It really does prevent cavities. But be sure to rinse out your mouth with water every time you brush so your body doesn't accumulate excessive fluorides that can damage your bones.

It takes 10 to 25 years of exposure to 4 to 10 times the recommended daily intake of fluorides to cause bone damage. If this happens to you, the first symptom is likely to be unexplained bone pain. What is going on is tiny fractures in the bone that hurt, but that don't interfere with motion. 

People of Cantonese and Korean descent are at greater risk for this kind of bone damage. In the United States, people who live in the South, in part because of the prevalence of iced tea as a beverage, are particularly susceptible to this kind of osteoporosis. If you have been drinking fluoridated water for a long time, there is no need to panic, but the three simple changes listed above may prevent painful changes to your bones caused by excessive fluoridation.