Seizures often come unannounced; the disturbance in your brain causes dangerous uncontrolled body movements, shaking and unconsciousness. It comes without saying seizures are hazardous, and they don’t only happen with people with epilepsy.
And although knowing when a seizure will strike is pretty hard, we think we might have a way to tell if you’re at risk of having one, and although this is not a definitive symptom of a sudden seizure, everything helps, right?
Well, it turns out the World Health Organization or WHO discovered that high exposures to fluoride, also called fluorosis, can lead to seizures. So, what’s this fluoride? And how is it that you can consume too much of it? Well, you won’t like the answer, but we thought you should know.
What Is Fluoride, anyway?
Fluoride is present in nature, it’s also in food, and cities use it to disinfect tap water. And since fluoride helps prevent and reverse dental caries and stimulate bone creation, it’s also present in toothpaste.
Have you ever heard you shouldn’t swallow toothpaste? We’ll you really shouldn’t — the stuff could cause you seizures. The problem with being exposed to high fluoride levels is that it affects your bones by not allowing your body to calcify them properly, making them brittle. This is called skeletal fluorosis.
And this is not what you want to know, but most cases of fluorosis don’t come from swallowing toothpaste but from drinking water — not all water is as safe as you think. If there’s too much fluoride in it, it’s not good for your bones. It might cause seizures as well.
So, How to Know if You’re Consuming Too Much Fluoride?
Determining if you’re consuming too much fluoride is hard, but it is possible. For starters, you might experience bone and joint pain, significantly because fluoride might already be weakening your bone structure.
And what does your mouth have to do with this? It turns out jaw pain, and brittle teeth are common symptoms of fluoride’s toxic effects. If you have mouth pains, and your dentist hasn’t found cavities or anything, then you might have too much fluoride in your body, and it might cause a seizure.
Now, the seizure is not the worst thing fluoride will do in your system; the damage to your bones is far more dangerous, as it’s irreparable. Seizures by fluoride are not all that common, but osteoporosis and fractures are. How’s that for a silent killer?
How to Prevent Fluoride Excess?
If you want to avoid the many unpleasant symptoms of having too much fluoride in your body, make sure you’re drinking safe water, and that’s not easy to assess. Depending on where you live, water might not be as safe, especially tap water. Some countries add too much fluoride to the water to compensate for water’s lousy quality or provenance, and the same could happen in your town.
Then you have bottled water. Some of it has fluoride, but not all, so read the label and make sure the only fluoride in contact with you is in your toothpaste, and remember, don’t swallow the stuff.
And not that you know this; avoid all types of supplements containing fluoride. Although fluoride is not all that bad, you shouldn’t overdo it. The compound will surely keep your teeth healthy, but it can do much more than that.
