I'm with you until the fluoride bit. Do you have any medical evidence to suggest there's any issue with fluoride?
Also why Berkey? They're extraordinarily expensive relative to alternatives, primarily for aesthetic gain.
Also why Berkey? They're extraordinarily expensive relative to alternatives, primarily for aesthetic gain.
"To join the armed services, men had to have six opposing teeth in their upper and lower jaws; in 1941, almost 10% of recruits were rejected for this reason alone"
Like it doesn't even matter if army recruits is a skewed sample, young men not having 6 pairs of teeth that touch is insane.
"In the early 1950s, two public health researchers stated that on average young men between the ages of 20 and 35 years had already lost an average of 4.2 teeth and that 90% of them were in need of bridges or full or partial dentures."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4504307/
The authoritative source of water fluoridation is https://www.york.ac.uk/media/crd/crdreport18.pdf which, broadly concludes that there isn't any strong evidence of harm.
Do wisdom teeth count? Because if they do, I am already missing 4 teeth, in addition to 4 more that were taken out to help make space for the rest of my teeth to prevent crowding.
So missing 4.2 teeth on average doesn't actually sound as bad as you make it out.
The positives of flouridation far outweigh any of the negative consequences that could occur. But I have never heard of anyone with a flouride problem in my life.
Most local teens grew up on well water and their teeth suffered for it.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Countries-with-Endemic-F...
It's the diet, flouride is a bandaid.
Read Weston Price's Nutrition and physical degeneration.
Some support for this, some rebuttal.[0] But yes, diet does seem to be acknowledged as very impactful.
On the flip side her late 90s grandmother still has some teeth and walks around unassisted. I don't think any of my grandparents made it to their 80s.
So basically while we don’t suffer for lack of fluoride to harden our teeth… the extra fluoride gives us a lot of protection. And yes you can have too much fluoride, but your never going to see that kind of medical pathology unless you somehow get a lot more bioavailable fluoride in you in a short span of time than you could possibly get from drinking multiple litres (or even gallons) of fluoridated water per day, they don’t put enough fluoride in the water to turn teeth brown, and we have ample evidence that fluoride bearing spring water above these concentrations does no harm for long periods of time.
I get being concerned, but we got so much more important things to worry about with regard to environmental chemicals than fluoride. It’s pretty easy to read the history, find out about the kids with the brown but perfect teeth, find the other stories from around the world, the second generation families living healthy on spring water that is/was naturally highly fluoridated, and put it all together yourself without need to take anyone’s word for the fact this actually is a pretty good “one weird trick for perfect teeth”.
1. Although filters are expensive upfront, they last a very long time and are cost-effective as a result
2. The large containers keep clean water accessible and at hand for things like cooking, and not just drinking
3. The simple design makes it so, were something to go wrong, I could craft my own filters onto their plumbing once the filters are spent. A ceramic filter would be trivial to make, for example.
4. Their filters last a long time so I don't need to frequently buy disposable filters and generate more waste. The waste from their filters is also minimal and predominantly biodegradable.
5. The system is low tech. It'll clean rain water in a pinch with no electricity. I don't need anything special to keep it working.
6. If the filters slow down, I can clean them to get them working better again. This makes them very versatile for off grid use where the inputs into the system might not be as clean as city water. This would ruin a lot of filters on the market.
7. The aesthetic gains!> But in our test on chloroform, the Black Berkey filters performed poorly, lowering it by just 13% in our test sample
> New Millennium Concepts, however, claims—right on the box the filters come in—that the Black Berkey filter reduces chloroform by 99.8%, to “below lab detectable limits.”
> However, he said that they stopped meeting the NSF removal standard after approximately 1,100 gallons of filtering—barely more than a third of the 3,000-gallon lifespan New Millennium claims for the Black Berkey filters.
I can subjectively tell good and bad water apart in double blind tests over a period of several hours, so I know that what's happening to me isn't just in my head. So -- I don't know whether it's fluoride or not, but it's definitely something.
The reason to suspect fluoride specifically is that a working Berkey "black" filter still produces "bad" water for me -- the white filter stage seems to be necessary. Twice now, I've had a white filter go bad on me that I didn't realize had happened, felt like crap, tested the water, found tap levels of fluoride, replaced it, and felt much better. The white filters are advertised to get fluoride and arsenic, so that makes it a prime suspect. I don't know exactly what else they might get that the problem might be, but there are a lot of suspects the black filter would block, and it's none of them. So if the problem isn't fluoride, it's something that that fluoride is a good proxy for in this setting.
As the problem I'm trying to fix is low key dehydration (as opposed to avoiding something medical like fluorosis), I don't expect there would be any medical research pointing to fluoride as a culprit. Neither will there be any saying it's safe for my purposes. I have found that while medicine as a field is excellent for healing injuries and saving lives, it's sort of terrible at optimizing health.
What I do know is that I drink a lot more water than is typical -- about two gallons a day when I am not nursing, and much more when I am. I also know that the studies that proscribe fluoride levels in drinking water are ancient, optimized narrowly for dental health, and based on average intake. I know as well that the difference between an effective dose of fluoride and a dose considered potentially dangerous is about an order of magnitude -- right about the difference between my water intake and what is typical. (And as an aside, it blows my mind that we make formula for babies with water like this, dosed based on evidence like that. They don't even have teeth!)
Hence, it's a prime suspect, but even if it turned out to not be that, I would still filter my water very aggressively because something real is definitely happening to me, and that definitely fixes it.
My choice of Berkey is that I want a maximally aggressive solution. I'm not looking to save money. I'm looking to nuke whatever it is that is causing me problems, and am perfectly fine with paying a bit extra to nuke everything. I bought one actually originally concerned about PFCs; discovering the filtered water made me feel much better was an unanticipated happy accident.
That's 3 times the recommended amount of water intake for pregnant women.