Fluoride-less or fluoride-filled toothpaste?
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Fluoride-filled or fluoride-less toothpaste, which one are you? For over a year now I’ve been using fluoride-less toothpaste, honestly I had been using it without really knowing why some people prefer to not ingest, or use the anion.
Over a month ago I went into the dentist for my scheduled check up and she asked me why I didn’t use fluoride in my toothpaste, and I had to tell her that I actually didn’t know why. That got me thinking, what are the pros, what are the cons of fluoride in toothpaste?
I headed over to speak with Dr. Michelle Wilczek-Piekarska, a local dentist, who says that, locally fluoride was quite the hot-topic not too long ago. She told us that the use of fluoride in small doses is beneficial to protecting the enamel on your teeth, protecting us from plaque build up which eventually leads to tooth decay. She says that we actually ingest fluoride everyday and might not know it, “fluoride is a naturally occurring anion, so it is present, not just in water but in a lot of the foods that we eat. So plants have fluoride in it, black teas have fluoride in it. So it is something we are ingesting everyday.”
She mentions that tooth decay is the most common reason–more common than asthma–for children ages 5-17 to be admitted to a hospital for general anesthetics. “So knowing those statistics and knowing that dental cavities, or dental decay is 100 percent preventable, we should probably look at things that help prevent them–and using fluoride is one of those things,” said Wilczek.
