Andrea reads the forums and articles on several parenting sites and sometimes points me to information that’s pretty interesting for our situation. Apparently, the American Dental Association acknowledges breast milk as “the most complete form of nutrition for infants,” and goes on to say that young children, and especially infants, shouldn’t drink fluorinated water. The fluoride isn’t an issue for us because Elena still gets 100% of her diet from breast milk, but Elizabeth drinks a lot of water for her size, so we’ve got to do some more research to find out if we need to be giving her different water.
marloelaine.com has a bunch of helpful links in the comments, but the gist is, our refrigerator, which like most of them has a carbon-based filter, doesn’t remove fluoride, so if we decide we want Elizabeth to get less fluoride in her water, we’ll have to either get a reverse-osmosis filter, or we’ll have to start buying her bottled water.
Researching items like this is, to me, one of the biggest advantages of the Internet age. It really lowers the time and money cost of finding information to help answer important lifestyle and health questions. Of course, anyone can put up a website, and many do, so we also have to be careful about our sources when we make decisions based on information we find on the Web.