You read that right: The use of deodorant can cause you an aluminium poisoning, and with your fluorine-containing toothpaste you brush yourself into your own grave! – These and similar scaremongerings are disseminated over the Internet again and again by stupid people, only to be taken seriously by even stupider ones. And if these “facts” at some point even make their way to the websites of some stupid Homeopaths, Naturopaths etc., the average idiot will of course take that as an additional confirmation from a credible authority.

So, my dear friends of uncritical receptivity and unchecked dissemination of pseudo-knowledge! Let’s go to the bottom of the case: Fluorine is a halogen gas and aluminum a metal. If you unscrew your toothpaste, does a squall of gas come out? And are there small metal splinters in your deodorant? Well, in mine there aren’t. Would be uncomfortably itchy under the arms, too, wouldn’t it …
What toothpaste and many deodorants really contain is fluoride and aluminum chloride. I only had a D in chemistry at school, and I was anything but interested in the subject, but even I was able to memorize that everything ending on “-ide”, “-ite” or “-ate” is a salt.

Now you might think: “Okay, okay, smart ass. So the correct names of the substances are different – still they are poisonous!”
I’ll just comment that as follows: Anyone who feels like it can go and buy aluminum chloride in the drugstore. It’s obtainable without prescription. And now I’ll give your your not-accustomed-to-active-use brains a brief moment to think about what that might mean in a country where a prescription is needed for almost everything that you could harm yourself with. You get it? – Right! The stuff is simply not dangerous. Of course, you should not necessarily drink it pure or something. But you shouldn’t do that with spiritus, citric acid or drain cleaner either. In deodorants, aluminum chloride is only contained in concentrations of about 10–30 %, which can at most result in a mild skin irritation, if you have especially sensitive skin.

As for the fluorides: Those do indeed need a prescription, but as you can see from the above linked drug prescription regulation, there are specific conditions under which it may be freely sold anyhow. Quote:

Fluoride, soluble,
– if not a daily dose is given on containers and outer packages which corresponds to a fluorine content up to 2 mg –
– except in preparations as a gel for topical use on the teeth in packs of up to 25 grams, as long as containers and outer packages indicate that the application is limited to adults and children over the age of 6 years and to a single dose per week, which corresponds to a fluorine content of 7 mg –

Now you, you know why “Elmex Gelée” is only offered in such tiny tubes – coincidentally exactly 25 grams – and why you should only use it once a week and only from six years up.

The lethal dose of aluminum chloride is about 3.45 g per kilogram of body weight.^[1] So a man of 70 kg would have to consume 241.5 grams of aluminum chloride in order to die. In other words: Depending on the concentration, he would have to spray four to twelve average sized spray cans of his favorite deodorant into his throat.
For the fluorides, the probably toxic dose is 5 mg per kilogram of body weight.^[2] The fluoride content in toothpaste lies at about 100 mg per tube, and according to the ingredient information on the packing, the 500-gram box of salt in my kitchen cupboard has been enriched with about 235–320 mg of fluoride. So in order to die, the abovementioned man would have to suck out three to four tubes of toothpaste, or toss a whole 500-gram pack of salt all at once – although I doubt that it would really be the fluoride then which kills him. The certainly toxic dose of fluoride, by the way, is stated even 7–13 times higher.

As so often, it is the hormetic effect, which has already been recognized by Paracelsus, that applies here:

“All things are poison and nothing is without poison, only the dose permits something not to be poisonous.”

You can also booze yourself to death with water, increase your cancer risk using vitamin C or poison yourself fatally from the green part of the tomato, as I have shown convincingly some time ago. It’s all a question of dose.

So. Now you can either believe me or turn back to your life beyond all media competence by penetrating the mailboxes of your friends, acquaintances and colleagues with the story of little lost Lisa, or support the bone marrow transplantation for poor, terminally ill Kevin with a generous donation. Oh, and do not forget to forward every ICQ and Facebook message, that asks you to, to fifteen people. Otherwise you will be deleted. Forever.