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Comment by davidj | Hacker News Reader

I loved drinking tea, but I recently stopped when I found out that green and black tea have a large amount of Fluoride, highly toxic to the human body. I drink just hot water, or one tea bag split between a whole tea pot, or coffee.

Edited: Fluoride is NOT a heavy metal. and spelling

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_fluoridation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_fluoridation_conspiracy

Citation please. Assuming you meant Fluoride: it's neither heavy nor a metal.

Yeah I screwed up, Fluoride (the correct spelling), which is a form of the ELEMENT Fluorine IS NOT a heavy metal like I confusingly thought.

But a simple google search will show you that Fluoride is highly concentrated in black and green tea.

Ah, yes... come to the dark side (of coffee). We have cookies! :-)

Coffee is also healthy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_effects_of_coffee

Fluoride is mentioned on Wikipedia, but was new to me. No details. Is this new?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_effects_of_tea#Effects_o...

That wikipedia entry is useless, there's numbers but not the numbers anyone actually would need.

This seems a little more useful: http://toxipedia.org/display/toxipedia/Fluoride+Content+in+T...

Apparently tea can have up to ~10x as high a Fluoride concentration as municipal drinking water.

Also, there seems to be a case of a woman who developed bone fluorosis after consuming several gallons of double strength instant tea a day for a considerable time.

So potentially it could be a concern but in practical terms it's unlikely to be a problem. If you're concerned I'd study which teas have the highest Fluoride levels (it's dependent on region and type of tea), determine whether your municipal tap water is also Fluoridated, and crunch some numbers to make sure you're nowhere near unsafe Fluoride consumption levels.

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