I just saw a TV ad for some brand of toothpaste for little kids. The selling points that they were aiming at “moms” (I guess fathers are meaningless in these pitches) were that the stuff was harmless to swallow and contained no flouride.
I thought that flouride was a good thing for growing teeth. In fact, I recall hearing that the medical community was alarmed that so many kids were drinking flouride-free bottled water that cavities were on the rise.
Have we entered a second generation of flouride scares, like those of the 1950s when some nutjobs thought that flouride in the water was Communist/government/liberal plot against the American way of life?
Well I guess it probably is a good thing, if the wierdos who think flouride is a mind-control tool of the zionist communist vampires will start having their kids brush their teeth without flouride as opposed to not brushing their teeth at all,.
Toddler toothpaste generally has no fluoride. Fluoride in toothpaste is great for topical application, bad for ingestion - it can speed tooth decay or even in extreme cases present a poisoning risk.
I don’t know the whole answer but many if not most places in the U.S. have fluoride in their municipal water supply. Maybe enough fluoride from any source give you all the benefits you are going to get. Fluoride can be toxic or even fatal in high doses. It isn’t good for a kid to eat a tube of toothpaste for example. They may be playing on this fear. However, it would not be good for people with private wells that have no fluoride to use this for their kids. It sounds like an irresponsible product to me. How many kids do you know that have gotten fluoride poisoning?
The idea is to limit the amount of fluoride ingested by small children to avoid fluorosis . When the kids are old enough to know how to spit, they move on to fluoride toothpaste. My almost 4-year old uses fluoride-free toothpaste, because he’s still swallowing it. Since we don’t have fluoridated water, he gets a vitamin with fluoride. He doesn’t need to be ingesting more than that.
The fear is that they will eat too much of the toothpaste and fluoride is not supposed to be eaten. At least that’s what my wife tells me. I try and tell her that a little bit of fluoride is not going to do anything to our daughter.
I think the big problem would be if she ate the whole tube, which she’s not going to do.
I don’t think you know what you are talking about.
I have three kids all under the age of 5 - right in the age group where this is an issue. Our pediatrician told us to use the infant and training toothpastes until the kids got old enough to know how to spit -then switch to a fluoride toothpaste.
Silly us, we assumed they knew what they were talking about. So we used products like these made by well-known manufacturers and sold in mainstream stores.
Our youngest is three, and is almost ready for regular toothpaste. All of the kids have strong healthy teeth.
So it isn’t as if this is some sort of off-the-wall practice. Very small children just need different toothpaste - no biggie.
Everybody KNOWS that the commies want to fluorodate our water-so they can contol us! just ask Gen. Buck Turgidson, USAF!
You have this completely wrong, of course.
You have to ask General Jack D. Ripper.
Well, myself actually. As a kid I had those spots on teeth from too much fluoride.