Fluoride in Pink Rock Salt?
Undoubtedly there is fluoride in most naturally occurring salts. The pertinent question is: how much? Many substances that are beneficial at low concentrations can be detrimental at higher concentrations. The Internet is full of speculation and unsupported claims about how much fluoride is in Himalayan Pink Rock Salt. To get a good answer, one should review analysis in the peer-reviewed literature.
I did, however find one site on the Internet that purports to provide a chemical analysis of this salt. The original source is from Water & Salt: The Essence of Life, by Peter Ferreira and Dr. Barbara Hendel, M.D.
The analysis only shows that the amount of fluoride is less than their detection limit of 100 mg/kg. According to such an analysis, there could be far less fluoride than that level. It does not tell us how much fluoride is actually present. If I have time and I'm still interested, I may do a literature search in the future to see if I can find better data. In the meantime, if someone beats me to the punch, please comment below.
A Thought Experiment
One gram of table salt is equal to 0.18 tsp. So what is the mass of one tsp of salt?
1 tsp x 1 g / 0.18 tsp = 5.6 g
Natural salts do not have exactly the same as density as pure sodium chloride; so applying this number to those salts is approximate, but it is not far off.
100 mg/kg is equal to 100 micrograms (μg)/g. So if we assume the salt could have as much as 100 mg/kg of fluoride, it would have 560 μg fluoride per teaspoon.
Compare that to the drinking water recommendation of 700 ppb (700 μg/liter). So consuming 1 tsp of salt with the aforementioned amount of fluoride is equivalent to drinking a little less than a liter of water at the recommended fluoridation level.
More precisely, it would be equivalent to drinking 570/700 or 814 milliliters (mL).
Should You Worry?
In a word, no, but you should not worry about fluoride in your water either, or GMOs for that matter, but that's another story. Having said that, natural salts can have a lot of other minerals in them too and they are not all necessarily good for you, but I would not particularly worry about that.
What If I Want To Worry About Something
Worry about arsenic in your water supply. The EPA recently lowered the standard to 10 ppb, and many communities do not meet that level. Worry about bacteria in your water supply. Worry about food-born pathogens. These are real problems that actually kill people, a lot of people. Worry about people who do not vaccinate their children. Worry about photochemical smog and respiratory disease. Worry about toxic cigarette smoke. Worry about the repercussions of global warming.
http://how-it-looks.blogspot.in/2013/05/gmo-free-salt-and-fluoride.html
Undoubtedly there is fluoride in most naturally occurring salts. The pertinent question is: how much? Many substances that are beneficial at low concentrations can be detrimental at higher concentrations. The Internet is full of speculation and unsupported claims about how much fluoride is in Himalayan Pink Rock Salt. To get a good answer, one should review analysis in the peer-reviewed literature.
I did, however find one site on the Internet that purports to provide a chemical analysis of this salt. The original source is from Water & Salt: The Essence of Life, by Peter Ferreira and Dr. Barbara Hendel, M.D.
The analysis only shows that the amount of fluoride is less than their detection limit of 100 mg/kg. According to such an analysis, there could be far less fluoride than that level. It does not tell us how much fluoride is actually present. If I have time and I'm still interested, I may do a literature search in the future to see if I can find better data. In the meantime, if someone beats me to the punch, please comment below.
A Thought Experiment
One gram of table salt is equal to 0.18 tsp. So what is the mass of one tsp of salt?
1 tsp x 1 g / 0.18 tsp = 5.6 g
Natural salts do not have exactly the same as density as pure sodium chloride; so applying this number to those salts is approximate, but it is not far off.
100 mg/kg is equal to 100 micrograms (μg)/g. So if we assume the salt could have as much as 100 mg/kg of fluoride, it would have 560 μg fluoride per teaspoon.
Compare that to the drinking water recommendation of 700 ppb (700 μg/liter). So consuming 1 tsp of salt with the aforementioned amount of fluoride is equivalent to drinking a little less than a liter of water at the recommended fluoridation level.
More precisely, it would be equivalent to drinking 570/700 or 814 milliliters (mL).
Should You Worry?
In a word, no, but you should not worry about fluoride in your water either, or GMOs for that matter, but that's another story. Having said that, natural salts can have a lot of other minerals in them too and they are not all necessarily good for you, but I would not particularly worry about that.
What If I Want To Worry About Something
Worry about arsenic in your water supply. The EPA recently lowered the standard to 10 ppb, and many communities do not meet that level. Worry about bacteria in your water supply. Worry about food-born pathogens. These are real problems that actually kill people, a lot of people. Worry about people who do not vaccinate their children. Worry about photochemical smog and respiratory disease. Worry about toxic cigarette smoke. Worry about the repercussions of global warming.
http://how-it-looks.blogspot.in/2013/05/gmo-free-salt-and-fluoride.html
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