Bioavailability of fluoride in humans from commonly consumed diets in India

There is a paucity of data on the amount of fluoride absorbed in humans from whole cooked food; especially a combination of different foods taken at regular meal times. The present study was thus aimed at estimating the amount of fluoride present and absorbed in humans from four regional representative meals viz. North Indian Vegetarian, North Indian Non-vegetarian, South Indian and East Indian. Twenty five healthy human volunteers aged 22-35 years participated in the study and each diet was tested on five volunteers. Each test diet was weighed into six equal parts, one part was kept for estimation of fluoride content and remaining five were given one each to the five test subjects in each of the four test diet groups. Eight hour plasma fluoride profiles were then studied after ingestion of weighed quantity of test diets and means calculated. The bioavailability of fluoride from these diets was evaluated in relation to that of sodium fluoride in solution form. The amount of fluoride estimated in different test diets varied between 1.53 - 10.0 mg. The bioavailability was found to be 1.6 per cent for north Indian vegetarian diet, 7.5 per cent for east Indian diet, 14.4 per cent for north Indian nonvegetarian diet and 31.7 per cent for south Indian diet, however, the amount of F(mg) absorbed in plasma from these diets was found to be low i.e. 0.06 mg, 0.75 mg, 0.72 mg and 0.48 mg respectively.