Last week, while staying at a cozy guest house in rural Mexico, I found an interesting item in the community refrigerator, left behind by a previous visitor: 

Fluoridated iodized salt “for your table and your kitchen”!  It seems that Mexico, too, has an abundance of fluoride to get rid of.  In fact, it turns out, Mexico is the world’s second-largest producer of fluorspar— the natural calcium fluoride used in industrial processes—right after China. 

According to the ingredients list, Carmen brand refined salt contains between 612 and 765 mg. per kg. (ppm) of potassium fluoride, a secondary reaction by-product of aluminum smelting.  By contrast, only 34 to 68 ppm of iodide are present—between one tenth and one twentieth that amount.  This is ironic:  fluoride is known to suck essential but less chemically reactive iodine out of the body through replacement, causing health damage, particularly to the thyroid gland. 

The discovery didn’t shock me, though it would have not too long ago.  We had always enjoyed our Mexico trips as a chance to get away, not only from the stresses of urban life but from fluoridated city water.  But about six months back I learned, quite by chance, that Mexico is one of a fair number of countries in Europe and Latin America that routinely fluoridate part or most of their table salt supply, including France, Switzerland, Germany, Uruguay and Costa Rica Even countries that take pride in eschewing the English-speaking world’s foolish and dangerous embrace of fluoride in drinking water don’t hesitate to foist it on their own populations in the form of salt.   There’s just too much of this toxic material around and, after all, it has to go somewhere.  And potassium fluoride mixes so nicely with those sodium chloride granules. 

The warning, in large, easy-to-read print, followed:              
                                                               

 “This product should not be used by populations where the fluoride content in human drinking water is more than 0.7 milligrams per liter.” 

To paraphrase:  This product is harmful in combination with water fluoridated at the level (0.7 ppm) the U.S. government considers ideal and wants to force on everybody. 

True, a lot of folks probably won’t be paying much attention to this sort of thing, won’t have any idea what their water’s fluoridation is, or won’t even be able to read it.  Millions of Mexicans speak one of the native Indian languages, not Spanish.  But at least they gave it the old college try.  They even made it legible.

By contrast, no U.S. water utility warns the public that if you are sick, or an infant, or an athlete, or a construction worker, or suffering from chronic health conditions like diabetes or kidney disease, or belong to any number of other high-risk categories, you shouldn’t be drinking their product.  They want to sell you their product, period.  They make the purveyors of toxic salt look positively gentlemanly.