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The Relative Assimilation of Fluorine from Fluorine-Bearing Minerals and Food (Tea), and from Water and Food¹

Division of Animal Nutrition, University of Illinois, Urbana

Comparisons have been made by controlled feeding experiments on growing rats, involving twenty-two trio groups, of the retention of dietary fluorine from supplements of sodium fluoride, calcium fluoride, green tea and raw rock phosphate, and from sodium fluoride administered in water and in food. In the latter comparison, the consumptions of water and of food were separated in time as much as possible in order to measure the unobscured effect. In the comparison of sodium fluoride and calcium fluoride, the salts were dissolved in water. In all experiments the fluorine was administered at levels sufficiently low (9 to 12 p.p.m.) to be of significance with reference to the fluorine hazard in human nutrition. The data secured support the following conclusions:

1. At these low levels of intake, the fluorine in sodium fluoride is no more assimilable by the animal body, and presumably no more toxic, than the fluorine in calcium fluoride. It is, however, definitely more assimilable (5%) than the fluorine in green tea, which in turn is probably somewhat more assimilable than the fluorine in raw rock phosphate.

2. The fluorine of sodium fluoride, administered in the drinking water at low levels, is 21% more completely assimilated by the animal body than the fluorine of the same compound consumed in the same amounts in the food. In a similar experiment previously carried out with cryolite as the source of fluorine, the depression in assimilation brought about by admixture with food was 20%.

Manuscript received 28 July 1941.