Transcription
So in a recent post in our community, 30,000 people engaged with the question, "Why no fluoride?" I thought it was good for our teeth. There's a lot of engagement with this post. It may be a question that you have. Maybe you've never posed. Maybe you're using fluoride in your toothpaste. Is this a good idea? It shows up in your tap water. Why? And is that safe? And what do we need to be looking out for for symptoms of too much fluoride? If you do have it, how do you get rid of it? And are there ways to keep your teeth clean, the enamel strong, without having to use a potential toxic substance like fluoride? I'm going to answer all those questions right now for you. Welcome in. It's Dr. Livingood. Let's dive right into it.
Fluoride, a big question mark. Uh, it is a very toxic chemical, uh, especially if too much exposure. It has been put into drinking water and fluoride treatments. As a kid, I remember using the goo. They make it like bubblegum flavor. Did you have that, right? And then they suck it out of your mouth. And yeah, that experience. Uh, it's in our toothpastes. It's in our mouthwashes. But are we getting way too much of this exposure? There's absolutely some areas of the country that are really struggling with children, especially, having enamel issues with their teeth. Is that the only way? And is that what's causing it? Is that there's not enough fluoride in our diet? Well, that answer is definitely no. Uh, it is caused by a lot of other issues like bacteria, the cleanliness, how much we're brushing, what we're eating, chemical exposure. And too much fluoride can actually have a lot of negative consequences. So let's take a look at those.
In adults, you might have too much fluoride exposure from the water that you're actually drinking, toothpaste you're using, or the mouthwash. If you have a lot of joint stiffness, numbness and tingling can start to happen as well. Uh, weaknesses, kidney, uh, dysfunction. There can be some swelling in the kidney, uh, problems with the tubules of the kidney. The stomach acid starts to form sort of a dyspepsia, indigestion, stomach aches, so to say. Uh, low immunity, and there's a gluten intolerance that increases with this. So if you're dealing with any kind of issues like this, this could be a solution of too much fluoride in your system.
Now, the reason we're taking it, a lot of times, is that we're trying to get more mineralization and more enamel on the tooth or on the bones itself. And so that enamel layer on the outside of the tooth starts to maybe break down a bit. That's from the bacteria, that's from the foods that we eat that get stuck in there. Uh, we're not properly cleaning them, or we have too little nutrition or too much acid, a lot of times in our diets. That that enamel is going away. So we add in fluoride because it helps strengthen the mineralization of the bone, and that enamel sort of protects it. But it is certainly not the cause of the loss of enamel. The loss of enamel is not due to a lack of fluoride. Fluoride is just a way to cover that symptom up. So in some ways, it's a level of a treatment. And just like any treatment, drug-related or anything like that, there can be side effects. So that's some of them with with an adult.
When it comes to children, there can be fluorosis, which is actually too much fluoride in the teeth, and it discolors them. And that can happen in as little as going over, uh, a 1 milligram per liter amount per day. If you go to 2 milligrams per liter amount, that's when we really start to see mental development decrease. There's been large studies. I put the references for you below in this link showing that if we get too much exposure. So we're going to look at, okay, how much does this actually equal? How much is in our toothpaste? How much is in our drinking water to know are our children getting anywhere close to this kind of exposure? Or are you? Tap water itself has on average a 0.2 milligram per liter in the United States. However, there are areas in this country that go as high as 4 milligrams per liter. Are we seeing developmental delays in our children because of that much tap water going in? Or some of these issues, maybe an unexplained stomach ache, where some kidney-related problems, or you're having numbness and tingling or weakness? If you already have some of those symptoms, we want to stay the heck away from too much fluoride. So we would definitely want to filter out the fluoride in that case.
When it comes to toothpaste or mouthwash, uh, typically you're going to see 1.2 milligrams per liter in a fluoride-based toothpaste. Uh, that's about a quarter of a teaspoon, which, um, was said in this study to be about the amount that gets squeezed on a toothbrush. So you're getting 1.2 milligrams per liter. So again, my three-year-old, my five-year-old tend to swallow the toothpaste. And so that becomes a problem. They get these doses. You're not paying attention. They like the taste of it. It's in some kind of flavor, and they swallow it. Now, we're not using fluoride-based toothpaste, but if we were, that would be a problem. 85% of known fluoride toxicity cases are actually due to toothpaste or mouthwash. Toothpaste or mouthwash, let alone this whole factor of tap water. So what do we do about this? So there is some concern there. If you're watching this, I got a little concerned. There's really in-depth research studies, uh, below. One of them from the Journal of Basic Medical Sciences. You can read those references, and it walks you through everything I'm walking through right now. I'm sort of giving you the highlights. It was a very interesting article to sort of explain, hey, I think we're overdoing the fluoride thing, and it's the problem with teeth aren't coming from lack of fluoride. What's it coming from?
So let me flip it around. All right, what do we do? Let me show you this. So if you're worried about fluoride toxicity, okay, and you feel like maybe I have too much of this built up, I'm showing some of the symptoms of it. Here's what you need to do. You want to increase the amount of calcium inside your body. You can do this by green leafy vegetables, broccolis, um, increasing amount of organic dairy that you have going in, or you might even be able to supplement with it a little bit. I don't want you to overdo calcium, but calcium's been known to block the uptake of fluoride, to decrease it in the system. Number two, we want alkaline foods. Alkaline foods diffuse and remove fluoride from the body. So these are going to be fruits and veggies, green juicing, vegetable juicing, uh, green greens powders. That's what I like to put in from an alkaline food perspective. And then number three, let's get the water filtered. And I like surface area filtration over reverse osmosis or distilled or any other types. I'm passing it over a medium that really will, uh, enhance getting the, uh, toxins out. And then specifically passing it over a medium that will get fluoride out. A lot of water filtration units will not remove fluoride. At our house, we have a special tank that actually removes it. I made an entire video on the quality of water and about surface area filtration. You can check that below, uh, in the description. Check out that link, and it breaks you down all the things of getting cleanliness, getting fluoride out, getting these toxins out. You can look at that.
So that's sort of detoxing from fluoride. Increased calcium, alkaline foods, water filtration to keep it out of the system. Um, from an oral care perspective, to start removing some of the sources outside of water filtration, let me show you the toothpaste and things that you can use to decrease this. So one, we want to decrease acidity. That's what's driving this problem a lot of times anyway. Way too much sugar, way too many carbohydrates, way too many, um, poor acidic foods because they're processed foods. So we want to decrease that acidity. We want to increase that alkaline. That's the driving force of poor oral care. Now, what is the alternative to fluoride? Is there anything else out there that will mineralize the teeth, that will help that enamel, that isn't super toxic for us? And the answer is unequivocally yes. Hydroxyapatite. Hydroxyapatite is a bone-formed, uh, sort of supplement. It becomes in micro little beads. It is worked into certain types of toothpaste and has research behind it. Links are below in the references of showing that it helps with the remineralization of teeth, helps protect the enamel of teeth, and it is non-toxic because it is made from inorganic sources. So that would be a great replacement to still get the benefits of what fluoride is doing without the toxicity of what fluoride has.
So what I did is put a link below of some products that we love. The Livingood family, myself and my wife. I don't make these products, but there's a couple of toothpastes, uh, just on an Amazon link to help you find resources, uh, like Davids or some of these brands that have hydroxyapatite in it. So if you're really like concerned, I want to make sure I'm worried about the enamel, I still want to get, you know, the fluoride benefits, I'm scared about having that my kid has enamel issues, I want to make sure we have something, then use the non-toxic version. Use that. Now, the other two things I want to look at are bacteria and cleaning. And so I lump these two together because this is going to look like, uh, properly cleaning the teeth, properly flossing the teeth, using a water pick, which would be high-pressure water in between the teeth to help spray out any particles or bacteria in there. Oil pulling, using coconut oil to pull in between the teeth to get bacteria out of there since it's antimicrobial. Properly caring for those. Hydrogen peroxide is another one I like to use a couple of times a week. We don't want to be overusing hydrogen peroxide or Listerine or a fluoride rinse because we're killing the good bacteria. Your body needs good bacteria. We wanted to keep the bad bacteria at bay. Proper cleaning does a lot of that.
So the next step for you here to really orally take care of your body without using toxic chemicals would be just to get good oral health. And I made a video about that, exactly how I do it, what my routine is, and some resources for you. You can check that video out right here.