In our quest to avoid flouride, I talked with my best friend about her process. She, as mentioned, is using the Tom's of Maine toothpastes. I'm working more on teaching my kids to spit it out for now, but will probably make that switch next toothpaste purchase. More importantly, though, is the attempt to avoid our tap water. Seemed kinda simple at first, just buy bottled. Well, it's not that simple.

See, there is plenty of bottled water which also contains flouride (especially the smallest bottles, as they seem to be "children sized"). So then we thought maybe a Brita filter, but then we both had the thought that that probably didn't filter out the flouride, which did turn out to be the case. So BA went on the internet and found that the only way to avoid flouride was by a reverse osmosis filtration system. We found that the Costco bottled water said on the side that it was purified by such a system. I'm happy to buy that water, as it's tasty. However those bottles are small drinking bottles, not very conducive to such things as boiling water, food prep water and the like. A fair amount of what we prepare still seems to require tap water, just for quantity (and cost effectiveness).

So now there's some thought of buying a reverse osmosis filtration system, which are quite expensive (about $320 for a system), but worth it if you consider buying bottled water for any length of time (consider, say, $7/case, and a case a week, or more? You easily equal your spending within a year). But it's a big up front cost to swallow, and we need to figure out if we have space under our sink for it (the practicalities).

In the meantime, we'll continue with our Costco water, I guess, but we will figure this thing out. What a frustrating "public health measure".