Assuming you’re getting regular dried pasta, there is no cooking happening to it at the factory, it’s all happening in your pot. It’s extruded or rolled out and cut and then just dried still raw. There may be some products out there that are precooked in some way, but that’s not your standard dry pasta noodle.
There’s two aspects to cooking dried pasta that usually happens roughly simultaneously when you boil it- rehydrating the noodles and cooking them. Rehydrating is mostly a matter of time- making sure they spend enough time in enough liquid for the pasta to soak it up, although higher temperatures do speed that up a bit. And cooking is mostly a matter of temperature- making sure it gets up to a temperature where the necessary chemical changes happen. There’s some recipes where that gets mixed up a bit, I’ve seen a couple that call for soaking the pasta before cooking, or there’s things like spaghetti all’assassina where it’s cooked before rehydrating.
So what’s going on here?
I suppose it’s possible that there was some kind of manufacturing issue, like the pasta wasn’t mixed or dried right so it’s not cooking or rehydrating properly. There’s really not much to most pasta dough, some nicer brands literally just list flour of some kind as an ingredient and nothing else, most grocery store brands probably have some of the other usual food additives you’d find in enriched flour, but really there’s not too much to mess up there, and if they messed up the mixing bad enough, odds are in probably wouldn’t have extruded or rolled out right either.
And I have a hard time imagining them screwing up the drying process bad enough in a way that could result in this that wouldn’t have just resulted in the pasta cracking apart before you got it.
So I think it’s more likely that something went screwy with the cooking.
I know you said you didn’t, but honestly the safe money is probably on that you just didn’t cook it long enough. Maybe it’s a different brand than you usually get, or you mistakenly used the cooking instructions from a different shape of pasta, or there was a misprint on the box.
Maybe you’re at a higher elevation where water boils at a lower temperature so the cooking and rehydration didn’t go quite right.
Maybe you over or under salted the cooking water, or added something else which affected it
Or maybe there’s some other water quality issue where your water that didn’t allow it to rehydrate as well as it should have.
Maybe it’s something else I’m not thinking of, but I can say with confidence that it wasn’t an issue with the cooking process at the factory because pasta does not get cooked and the factory.
Also not a biologist and I’m similarly out of my depth, but I’m pretty sure this part of the quoted text is kind of explaining that, but from the perspective of laypeople like us, is kind of glossing over it.
Surface area and mass/volume don’t scale the same way (for example the square-cube law- a 1inch cube has a volume of 1 cubic inch, and a surface area of 6 square inches, so a 1:1 ratio of volume to surface area,a 10inch cube has a volume of 1000 cubic inches, and a surface area of only 600 square inches, so a 5:3 ratio of volume to surface area )
I don’t know where/how in the body fluoride gets absorbed, but for the sake of argument, let’s say it gets absorbed through your stomach lining, so a big limiting factor in how much and how fast you absorb it is how much surface area the inside of your stomach has. More surface area means absorb fluoride more quickly.
So if rats were just scaled-down humans, you’d expect them to need a lower concentration to absorb the same kind of dose as a human.
But rats aren’t just scaled down humans. They’re rats.
And again, not a biologist, I have basically no idea what the inside of a rat looks like. Maybe their stomachs are roughly the same size proportionally to us, or maybe they’re significantly bigger or smaller, which would throw off how much stomach surface area they have available to they absorb fluoride.
And of course their metabolism and body chemistry is going to be different than a human. I’m pretty sure their metabolic rate is way higher than ours so basically everything inside the rat is happening faster, stuff is getting absorbed faster, but also excreted faster, and food/water is spending less time in the stomach leaving less time for that fluoride to get absorbed.
And maybe rats are just fundamentally better or worse at absorbing and metabolizing fluoride than we are, maybe their stomach lining is just more or less capable of absorbing fluoride, maybe they have more or less of some protein or enzyme or something that does something with that fluoride so it gets used more or less efficiently by their body, etc.
So all of that would need to be taken into account. Whole lot of math involved figuring that out that I don’t even want to think about.
And, of course, experimentally, we want to be able to see and measure the effects. The study is looking for its effects on the brain, not, for example, liver and kidney function (or whatever organs would be damaged by too much fluoride.) Trying to measure the IQ of a rat I’m sure is already hard enough in general, let alone trying to measure potentially very minute changes in it. It may be they’re trying to push the dose as high as they can to try to create any measurable cognitive symptoms, if we’re giving the rats 6x the normal dose, maybe to a level where it might damage their kidneys or something, and still not seeing any cognitive issues, it’s probably pretty safe to say that a normal, safe, dose isn’t going to cause issues either.