What Is Fluoride & How Does It Impact Tooth Health

00:00:00.000 | But in order for you to understand what I say about fluoride

00:00:04.800 | and to make the best decision about fluoride,

00:00:06.820 | both in drinking water and toothpaste, et cetera, for you,

00:00:09.880 | you have to understand the remineralization process

00:00:12.680 | just a little bit, just a little bit.

00:00:14.640 | So a little bit of chemistry here,

00:00:15.720 | a little bit of structural biology, and this'll be fun.

00:00:17.540 | I promise, even if you know no biology,

00:00:20.100 | no structural biology, no chemistry,

00:00:22.240 | you're going to like this part, and it's very simple.

00:00:24.840 | Those minerals that form the crystals within the enamel

00:00:28.480 | and some of the deeper layers of your tooth,

00:00:30.320 | or teeth, rather,

00:00:31.360 | those crystals form through a specific type of bond,

00:00:35.360 | and those bonds are very strong.

00:00:36.560 | Think of them like Lego chains,

00:00:37.880 | but these are not just conventional Lego chains.

00:00:40.360 | These are Lego chains that when they stick,

00:00:42.940 | when two pieces come together,

00:00:44.760 | things are tough to pull apart.

00:00:47.560 | They're not indestructible, but they're tough to pull apart.

00:00:50.160 | And they're also special because unlike a string of Legos,

00:00:52.920 | like a single string of Legos,

00:00:55.160 | these bonds that form during remineralization of the teeth

00:00:59.840 | are interdigitated with one another,

00:01:01.560 | or rather, are at angles with one another

00:01:03.840 | that make those bonds especially strong.

00:01:06.280 | Any architect or somebody that understands

00:01:08.160 | structural biology will understand

00:01:09.400 | that bonds can be weak or strong

00:01:10.880 | depending on whether or not they're linear,

00:01:12.640 | whether or not they're crossed,

00:01:13.680 | whether or not they're in lattices.

00:01:15.120 | There's a whole bunch of interesting angled forces stuff

00:01:18.360 | that the architects will understand,

00:01:19.760 | and the construction workers will understand

00:01:22.040 | at a very intuitive and in concrete level,

00:01:24.240 | no pun intended, and on and on.

00:01:26.420 | But just think about it.

00:01:27.920 | A bond is only as strong as the number of different points

00:01:32.540 | at which it can resist shearing and pressure.

00:01:35.140 | So the way that these remineralization bonds form

00:01:39.240 | is through the addition of specific minerals

00:01:41.800 | at specific angles and the naturally occurring mineral

00:01:44.720 | that's responsible for the majority of these bonds

00:01:46.780 | in the enamel and teeth is called hydroxyapatite.

00:01:50.640 | What a great name if you're talking about oral health,

00:01:52.600 | right, 'cause we use the mouth for a lot of things.

00:01:54.920 | You can think of the small list or long list of those things.

00:01:57.040 | There are many of them, you know, depending on who you are

00:01:59.600 | and what you like to do with your mouth.

00:02:01.240 | But the point being that we do indeed eat with our mouth.

00:02:04.680 | Appetite is part of eating.

00:02:05.680 | So you just remember hydroxyapatite bonds,

00:02:07.920 | and they are very strong, but they're not indestructible.

00:02:11.200 | Acid can actually break those bonds.

00:02:13.600 | Okay, that's the demineralization process.

00:02:16.180 | Now, fluoride is a substance that is not a vitamin.

00:02:20.700 | It's not a mineral.

00:02:21.880 | It is not an essential nutrient,

00:02:23.620 | but that in the last century, it was discovered,

00:02:27.140 | can actually replace some of the hydroxyapatite bonds

00:02:31.040 | in teeth and actually make those bonds hyper strong,

00:02:34.620 | super physiologically strong.

00:02:36.900 | Now, we'll talk about the safety considerations

00:02:38.900 | with fluoride in a little bit,

00:02:40.000 | because there are some safety considerations,

00:02:42.060 | but it was decided en masse in the United States and Europe

00:02:46.200 | that the addition of fluoride to the drinking water

00:02:49.140 | and to many toothpastes or tooth powders would be useful

00:02:53.420 | because it creates these super physiologically strong bonds

00:02:57.760 | within the minerals of the teeth.

00:02:59.980 | And indeed it does, it does.

00:03:02.620 | Fluoride gets between those Lego pieces

00:03:05.500 | and makes them extra, extra strong.

00:03:07.680 | And this is why fluoride is added to the drinking water.

00:03:10.780 | But, and this is very important to emphasize,

00:03:13.660 | but nowadays there's a really polarized debate

00:03:18.020 | about fluoride,

00:03:19.620 | because some people out there believe that fluoride

00:03:22.540 | can disrupt thyroid health,

00:03:24.060 | might even be disruptive for brain health.

00:03:27.300 | Certainly if fluoride levels are too high

00:03:29.420 | in drinking water or any substance,

00:03:31.460 | it can be very dangerous.

00:03:32.820 | It can be a poison,

00:03:33.640 | but of course the dose makes the poison, right?

00:03:35.580 | Fluoride itself may not be poisonous at very low levels,

00:03:39.120 | but there are really two camps now that have formed.

00:03:41.340 | And I'll just illustrate those two camps

00:03:42.760 | by virtue of what's happening right now.

00:03:44.620 | Right now in the state of California,

00:03:46.640 | there is a major lawsuit against the government

00:03:49.900 | because people want fluoride removed from the drinking water

00:03:52.680 | because of the long list of bad things that excessive,

00:03:56.720 | I wanna highlight excessive fluoride can do

00:03:58.820 | for bodily and brain health,

00:04:00.080 | especially in kids, but also in adults.

00:04:02.280 | At the very same time, meaning right now,

00:04:04.240 | there is also a major lawsuit,

00:04:05.760 | this one in Buffalo, New York,

00:04:07.360 | from mostly parents who are suing the city of Buffalo,

00:04:10.600 | saying that there was not enough,

00:04:12.040 | maybe even zero fluoride in the drinking water

00:04:14.320 | for some period of time.

00:04:15.220 | And as a consequence, their children's teeth

00:04:17.740 | or oral health or both is depleted

00:04:21.240 | and they are suing for damages.

00:04:23.200 | Okay, so this is a really polarized camp.

00:04:25.700 | Now I did a full episode of the Huberman Lab Podcast

00:04:28.080 | all about water.

00:04:29.200 | And I talked about fluoride levels,

00:04:31.180 | which levels are thought by the CDC to be safe,

00:04:33.920 | which levels are not thought to be safe.

00:04:36.100 | I talked about some of the theories

00:04:37.680 | as to how fluoride might disrupt function of the thyroid

00:04:41.100 | and some considerations there.

00:04:42.840 | Please check out the timestamp in that episode.

00:04:44.600 | I linked to that timestamp in the caption for this episode.

00:04:47.680 | But the important point here is that

00:04:49.360 | if you are at all concerned about fluoride

00:04:51.040 | in the drinking water,

00:04:52.240 | the simple answer is to just filter the water

00:04:55.140 | that comes out of the tap.

00:04:56.100 | If you're concerned about fluoride,

00:04:57.240 | then I suppose you'd probably wanna avoid toothpaste

00:04:59.620 | that have fluoride.

00:05:00.460 | Indeed, there are some.

00:05:01.560 | I will provide links to some of those

00:05:03.120 | in the show note captions for this episode.

00:05:05.080 | There are a variety of these zero fluoride toothpaste

00:05:07.680 | that have started to accumulate.

00:05:09.480 | But keep in mind that when fluoride is introduced

00:05:12.640 | into the bonds of the minerals of the teeth,

00:05:14.600 | they do make the teeth really, really strong.

00:05:16.880 | But, and all the dentists I spoke to emphasize this point,

00:05:20.200 | the bonds that form are not the natural bonds.

00:05:22.720 | Now, the fact that they're not the natural bonds

00:05:24.360 | doesn't necessarily mean that they aren't good for us

00:05:26.720 | or that they're bad for us.

00:05:28.220 | But the bonds that form when viewed

00:05:29.680 | under what's called electron microscopy look different.

00:05:32.120 | They look wavy.

00:05:33.240 | They're not smooth bonds.

00:05:34.620 | And they do increase the resistance to different forces,

00:05:39.620 | including cavities or acid that would create cavities

00:05:42.780 | to be specific.

00:05:43.960 | They make the teeth stronger structurally,

00:05:46.200 | so resistance to chipping, et cetera.

00:05:48.460 | But there is a growing concern about excessive fluoride,

00:05:52.720 | which by the way, if you drink a lot of tap water,

00:05:56.360 | you're going to be exposed to more fluoride

00:05:57.920 | than if you drink less tap water.

00:05:59.200 | That's just kind of stands to reason,

00:06:00.600 | but people don't really talk about this, right?

00:06:02.360 | When you talk about X amount of fluoride

00:06:04.080 | by concentration in a given liter of water

00:06:06.040 | or gallon of water, you also have to ask,

00:06:07.840 | well, how much tap water are you drinking every day?

00:06:09.760 | Okay, you have to ask that question, right?

00:06:11.240 | It's not simply the concentration,

00:06:13.000 | it's how much you're ingesting overall.

00:06:14.800 | And that's something that's much harder to control for.

00:06:17.920 | Again, in the water episode, I talked about ways

00:06:19.520 | to eliminate or reduce fluoride in the drinking water

00:06:21.520 | if that's a concern of yours.

00:06:23.000 | But if you want to know why there's fluoride

00:06:24.520 | in drinking water, it's because governments figured out,

00:06:27.200 | hey, well, if we want to reduce tooth decay,

00:06:29.320 | what's the simplest low cost method to do that?

00:06:33.100 | Well, it's to put fluoride in the drinking water.

00:06:35.720 | And you now also now know why there's fluoride

00:06:39.000 | in a lot of toothpaste.

00:06:40.360 | But given the concerns about thyroid health,

00:06:42.440 | potential concerns about brain health,

00:06:44.800 | now you also know why many people,

00:06:47.640 | including some dentists that I spoke to,

00:06:49.600 | are not big fans of fluoride,

00:06:52.080 | both for children and for adults.

00:06:53.960 | So you just have to make a decision for you.

00:06:55.400 | I'm not here to tell you what to do.

00:06:56.800 | You just have to decide, are you pro neutral

00:06:59.420 | or against fluoride in your drinking water?

00:07:01.220 | And if so, are you going to filter?

00:07:02.840 | Are you going to completely avoid drinking any water,

00:07:05.280 | maybe even cooking with any water from the tap

00:07:06.980 | and on and on?

00:07:07.820 | But now you know why fluoride is in drinking water

00:07:09.700 | and fluoride is in toothpaste.

00:07:12.000 | If you're somebody who's concerned about fluoride

00:07:14.320 | in either or both of those sources,

00:07:16.540 | well, then what you really want to think about

00:07:17.960 | and what most of us probably should be thinking about anyway

00:07:21.200 | is trying to increase the remineralization state

00:07:24.240 | of our teeth and mouth in ways

00:07:27.160 | that don't create the opportunity

00:07:29.460 | for any other health hazard.

00:07:30.920 | And I will say this as well,

00:07:32.480 | which is that there's some data, not a lot,

00:07:35.640 | but some data that fluoride might not be so great

00:07:38.240 | for our oral microbiome.

00:07:39.580 | And as we'll soon learn,

00:07:40.640 | the oral microbiome is critical

00:07:42.600 | for our oral and overall health.

00:07:44.840 | [upbeat music]

00:07:48.260 | [upbeat music]

00:07:50.840 | (upbeat music)

What Is Fluoride & How Does It Impact Tooth Health | Dr. Andrew Huberman

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