From:	Marc Renouf renouf@********.com
Subject:	Second Hand
Date:	Thu, 2 Sep 1999 11:07:25 -0400 (EDT)

On Wed, 1 Sep 1999, Da Twink Daddy wrote:

> Well, that's what they _claim_ it is there for. Personally I don't belive
> it. If it was possible to just drink floride and get the effect of a
> floride treatment, dentists would just send you home with a bottle of
> grape flovoured flouride and say take X much Y times a day for Z days.

Actually, they do. There are several ways to get enough floride
for your teeth. Drinking water is one of them. I live in an area where
the drinking water has floride. I have good teeth. I have *never* had a
floride treatment (gel or wash) form a dentist. Neither has anybody I
know. Why? Because we don't need it. Why? Because we get it from the
drinking water.

> I live in an area with florinated water, and I have to get flouride
> treatments every 2-3 years. Sure, maybe it's not as often as every 6 mo.
> but I still can't belive that has anything to do with the water. (I think
> it's my florinated toothpaste -- direct contact with the enamel.)

See my above comment. Maybe your area doesn't do it enough.

> Saying the trace ammounts in the water you drink can help you teeth is
> fairly ludacris <sp>. If you belive in homeopathic solutions than, sure; I
> don't.

It's spelled "ludicrous," but until you can give me a reasonable
argument (i.e. backed by some evidence) that says that regular (daily)
exposure to a smaller amount of floride doesn't help one's teeth, you have
no basis for that statement. Perhaps you should instead say that you
*believe* it's ludicrous, not that it *is*.

> > If there's a conspiracy afoot, you must realize that that means
> > that *every* dentist in America is in on it.
>
> Not really, the government don't need *every* dentist to say something
> works to enact a law based on that. They just need a few [bribed] ones and
> a few [bribed/killed] ones shut up.

Yeah. And Abraham Zapruder worked for the KGB.

> > It's easy to lie with pseudo-science. Being net-denizens we've
> > all read that bogus warning about aspartame.
>
> Hey the aspartame thing is true. You just have to understand that the
> amount of aspertame in a packet [or box] of sweetener is <<< [much much
> less than] the amount of aspartame they were giving the rats. (of course
> scaled to human wieghts.) [Kinda like the Yellow5 tests.]

That's more or less exactly my point. If you get three orders of
magnitude more of *anything* it can and probably will kill you. Hell, if
you drink too much freakin' distilled, pure, fresh water it can kill you.
Does this mean that water is toxic? Should I avoid even trace amounts of
it?
Further, the aspartame thing is *not* true in a number of ways.
It directly linked aspartame to a number of specific health problems in a
causal role. These "findings" were totally unfounded. Like I said, it's
easy to lie with pseudo-science.

Marc