Fluoride still not safe, despite tooth-decay data
The headline of a recent news post from Reuters reads, Flouride in tap water may help older teeth too. To the casual reader, this headline seems to indicate that protecting the teeth of old people is just one of the many benefits of fluoridated tap water. But according to a growing array of scientists and health activists, nothing could be further from the truth.
Dr. Russell Blaylock, M.D., a respected medical practitioner and health newsletter author, devoted an entire issue of his Blaylock Wellness Report to the subject of fluoride. What he had to say in his introduction was not favorable:
The primary reason fluoride began being added into drinking water years ago was to reduce cavities; the general public may not know that fluoride also can injure the nervous system and even cause cancer.
Degenerative brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s are possibly linked to drinking fluoridated water. Cancer, behavioral problems, thyroid suppression, male infertility and impotence are also some examples of what may happen to the body when too much fluoride is present. And the combination of fluoride and aluminum is toxic enough that scientists warn about its connection to Parkinson’s and Lou Gehrig’s diseases. Fluoride will not kill you outright or cause dementia over a short period of time. But at certain levels it will accumulate in your brain and can lead to a form of degeneration.
I lectured at the Fluoride Action Network conference on the subject of the toxic effects of water fluoridation and urged everyone to stop the government from using drinking water to medicate the public.
Despite the efforts of Blaylock and others to educate the public, a single-minded obsession with the alleged benefits of fluoride in preventing tooth decay—regardless of more significant health concerns—pervades public health policy and pollutes the outpourings of the general press. A recent search on Amazon under the topic fluoride returns a list that begins with the following titles:
- The Fluoride Deception
, by Christopher Bryson
- Fluoride the Aging Factor: How to Recognize and Avoid the Devastating Effects of Fluoride
, by John Yiamouyiannis
- Fluoride: Drinking Ourselves to Death
, by Barry Groves
- Hidden Agenda: The Fluoride Deception (Training Manual for Parents, Physicians, and Dentists)
, by Dr. Stanley “Stan” Monteith
- Fluoride in Drinking-water (WHO Water Series)
, by J. K. Fawell, J. Bailey, J. Chilton, and E. Dahi
- Fluorides in the Environment
(Cabi Publishing) by L. H. Weinstein and A. W. Davison
Interspersed among the book titles are products containing fluoride (such as Crest toothpaste) or helping to lace drinking water with fluoride, and so on. Could there be a clearer indication of our public schizophrenia in the face of the evidence against fluoride?
The books listed are not touting the benefits of fluoridation. The World Health Organization, although stating that small quantities of fluoride impart resistance to dental caries, seems more concerned with the limits of fluoride that should be allowed in drinking water. The WHO literature mainly treats fluoride as an environmental hazard:
In many regions with high fluoride exposure, fluoride is a significant cause of morbidity. Low concentrations provide protection against dental caries, especially in children. The pre- and post-eruptive protective effects of fluoride (involving the incorporation of fluoride into the matrix of the tooth during its formation, the development of shallower tooth grooves, which are consequently less prone to decay, and surface contact with enamel) increase with fluoride concentration up to about 2 mg/litre of drinking water; the minimum concentration of fluoride in drinking-water required to produce it is approximately 0.5 mg/litre.
However, fluoride can also have an adverse effect on tooth enamel and may give rise to mild dental fluorosis at drinking-water concentrations between 0.9 and 1.2 mg/litre, depending on intake. Elevated fluoride intakes can also have more serious effects on skeletal tissues. It has been concluded that there is a clear excess risk of adverse skeletal effects for a total intake of 14mg/day and suggestive evidence of an increased risk of effects on the skeleton at total fluoride intakes above about 6mg/day.
–The World Health Organization, Chemical Fact Sheets
Note that the WHO data shows an overlap between the level of fluoridation believed to reduce caries (0.5 to 2 mg/liter) and the level causing mild fluorosis (0.9 to 1.2 mg/liter). Thus, according to the World Health Organization it is difficult—if not impossible—to adjust fluoride levels in water so as to minimize caries without introducing the risk of dental fluorosis as well.
And dental fluorosis—defined as under-mineralization of the teeth, which manifests by giving teeth a mottled appearance—is about the least of our worries. Among the problems linked to excess fluoride intake are depression of thyroid function, which itself leads to multiple degenerative conditions; brain damage that includes tendencies toward ADD, ADHD, and dyslexia; bone cancer; male infertility and impotence; and Lou Gehrig’s and Parkinson’s diseases, to repeat just the major headliners.
Twenty people died outright in the Donora, Pa. air-pollution tragedy of October, 1948, while another 50 succumbed to their injuries over the following month. That disaster struck when a temperature inversion trapped a layer of air containing heavy concentrations of fluoride emitted from a U.S. Steel plant and a neighboring zinc facility over the town of Donora for a period of five days. The incident sparked awareness of air pollution as an issue and lead to the Clean Air Act of 1955.
Unfortunately, the safety levels cited in the WHO statistics assume that water is the only source of fluoride ingestion from the environment. But there is no way to judge safe levels of consumption of fluoridated water when the body has so many possible ways of reaching fluoride overdose. In fact, the early U.S. government studies on the effects of fluoride began in anticipation of the increased fluoride pollution in the environment that would be brought about by the manufacture of atomic devices and other sources of fluoride pollution such as the steel, aluminum and electrical power industries. Until World War II, fluoride production in the United States was negligible.
Burning coal, for example, not only accounts for the bulk of industrial mercury pollution today, it also contributes mightily to pervasive fluoride pollution. Since fluoride is readily absorbed by plants and subsequently by the humans and other animals consuming those plants, not only does fluoride enter the human body through food sources, it does so in concentrations that are increasing steadily over time. For example, tea—especially green tea—contains large amounts of fluoride, because tea absorbs fluoride more readily than any other edible plant. Comparisons of studies on the chemical composition of tea show that the fluoride content of tea appears to have risen steadily over recent decades.
Recent estimates of average human intake of fluoride from dietary sources (water and food) run as high as 8 mg daily. For some areas in China, the WHO has estimated daily intakes as high as 8.9 mg from food and 0.3 to 2.3 mg from the air.
The eminent toxicologist Dr. Phyllis Mullenix discovered that fluoride accumulates in the brain and leads to behavioral disorders. Her studies while head of toxicology research at the renowned Forsyth Dental Center in Boston, Mass., at the time an affiliate of the Harvard Medical School, convinced her that fluoridation of drinking water was a dangerous practice. Her initial investigations in rats indicated that feeding sodium fluoride in drinking water caused the rats to become hypoactive (”couch potatoes”) while prenatal exposure to the substance resulted in hyperactivity. She also found that the IQs of the rats were effectively lowered by fluoride accumulation.
Blaylock cites studies in China that confirm these findings in humans:
in China, children who drink fluoridated water have lower IQs than those who don’t. Many villages and cities in China have natural fluoride levels that are high, and Chinese scientists have found a drop of 10 points in IQ in fluoridated cities.
The irony is that ridding our bodies of fluoride, or at least controlling its absorption, should be the focus of our public-health efforts, not adding to our accumulation of this toxic substance.
In the human body, fluoride concentrates most heavily in the pineal gland, which is responsible for producing melatonin. Melatonin not only regulates the body’s circadian rhythm and sleep cycles, it also controls the onset of puberty in children and has been shown to suppress the growth of cancer tumors. Melatonin—produced by the pineal gland when the body is not exposed to light—normally reaches its highest levels in pre-pubertal children.
It is generally believed that the reduction of melatonin levels in teenagers triggers the onset of puberty.
Jennifer Luke’s PhD thesis
Research by Jennifer Luke published in the journal Caries Research in 2001 (Fluoride Deposition in the Aged Human Pineal Gland) established that phenomenally high levels of fluoride accumulate in the human pineal gland. Follow-up research by Luke demonstrated that gerbils fed fluoride showed suppressed production of the hormone melatonin. Luke hypothesizes that fluoride achieves this affect by interfering with the activity of enzymes that produce melatonin from serotonin. Her paper ends with this conculsion:
the human pineal gland contains the highest concentration of fluoride in the body. Fluoride is associated with depressed pineal melatonin synthesis by prepubertal gerbils and an accelerated onset of sexual maturation in the female gerbil. The results strengthen the hypothesis that the pineal has a role in the timing of the onset of puberty. Whether or not fluoride interferes with pineal function in humans requires further investigation.
The subsequent publication and considerable publicity surrounding The Falling Age of Puberty in U.S. Girls lent urgency to these findings. That publication states that “Early puberty in girls is associated with a startling number of psychopathologies and health problems.” It then goes on to enumerate some of these, including depression, eating disorders and adjustment disorders. It also cites the known link between early puberty and an increased incidence of breast cancer.
Fluoridation is not only suspected as at least one major factor in early maturation of girls, it appears to be contributing as well to perinatal deaths. A toxicologist in the United Kingdom recently reported that perinatal deaths in a fluoridated area were 15 percent more common than in neighboring non-fluoridated areas. He also found that the fluoridated area had a 30 percent higher rate of Down’s Syndrome, a disease associated with thyroid pathology. This result was not surprising, since in the 1950s, Ionel Rapaport published studies showing links between Down’s Syndrome and natural fluoridation. Similarly, Chile discontinued its fluoridation program after research by the late Dr. Albert Schatz showed it was causing infant deaths in that country.
Dr. George Waldbott, the allergist who first warned Americans against cigarette smoking in the 1950s, has stated that fluoride contributes to migraine headaches, bone stiffness, and gastric distress. The list of respected researchers warning against the dangers of fluoride is long and growing. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s professional workers union (which includes the agency’s scientists and lawyers) has gone on record against fluoridation.
To guard against fluoride toxicity, Blaylock recommends taking 200 ug of selenium daily and 1,000 mg of calcium citrate daily to neutralize both aluminum and fluoride. He also recommends avoiding aluminum and Teflon cookware, as well as toothpastes and other household products that contain fluoride. Vitamin C and magnesium supplements round out the precautions he recommends to minimize the body’s fluoride load.
Despite all the evidence, resistance to the truth about fluoride lingers. An online article entitled Community Water Fluoridation, launches into a diatribe that exemplifies the portrayal of fluoridation opponents by pro-fluoride groups:
Opponents of fluoridation are a small, heterogeneous group who cannot easily be categorized by any single characteristic. They include right-wing extremists, misguided environmentalists, some chiropractors, persons concerned with the costs of fluoridation, food faddists, antiscience “naturalists,” and those who believe strongly in individual rights. Vocal opponents to fluoridation have attempted to link various adverse health effects with fluoridation. Claims that fluoride is harmful have been amply reviewed by international, national, state, and local authorities. Many committees or commissions of experts in medicine, epidemiology, pathology, pharmacology, and toxicology have reaffirmed the safety of community water fluoridation.
At the risk of joining a “small, heterogeneous group,” we have to hold with those who have stayed open to the steady accumulation of scientific evidence. Fail to avoid fluoride at your own risk. And if you’re undecided, remember that most European countries have banned fluoridation altogether.
[Editor's note: This piece was originally posted under Articles/Editorials. Because that version became damaged, it was re-posted later as a blog entry. We have since restored it as an Article/Editorial, but have not deleted the Post copy to avoid any problems that might occur with bookmarks and search engines. Thus, if you search our site for articles about "fluoride," for example, you will indeed find two otherwise identical copies of the article, one listed under Posts, the other under Articles/Editorials.]
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