Sugar in tomato sauce

Most commercial foods contain sugar and people tend to assume it's only a small amount. But often it isn't!

Eskimos Prove An All-Meat Diet Provides Excellent Health

 By Vilhjalmur Stefansson
Harper’s Monthly Magazine, November 1935.

Part I

In 1906 I went to the Arctic with the food tastes and beliefs of the average American. By 1918, after eleven years as an Eskimo among Eskimos, I had learned things which caused me to shed most of those beliefs. Ten years later I began to realize that what I had learned was going to influence materially the sciences of medicine and dietetics. However, what finally impressed the scientists and converted many during the last two or three years, was a series of confirmatory experiments upon myself and a colleague performed at Bellevue Hospital, New York City, under the supervision of a committee representing several universities and other organizations.

Not so long ago the following dietetic beliefs were common: To be healthy you need a varied diet, composed of elements from both the animal and vegetable kingdoms. You got tired of and eventually felt a revulsion against things if you had to eat them often. This latter belief was supported by stories of people who through force of circumstances had been compelled, for instance, to live for two weeks on sardines and crackers and who, according to the stories, had sworn that so long as they lived they never would touch sardines again. The Southerners had it that nobody can eat a quail a day for thirty days.

There were subsidiary dietetic views. It was desirable to eat fruits and vegetables, including nuts and coarse grains. The less meat you ate the better for you. If you ate a good deal of it, you would develop rheumatism, hardening of the arteries, and high blood pressure, with a tendency to breakdown of the kidneys – in short, premature old age. An extreme variant had it that you would live more healthy, happily, and longer if you became a vegetarian.

Specifically it was believed, when our field studies began, that without vegetables in your diet you would develop scurvy. It was a “known fact” that sailors, miners, and explorers frequently died of scurvy “because they did not have vegetables and fruits.” This was long before Vitamin C was publicized.

The addition of salt to food was considered either to promote health or to be necessary for health. This is proved by various yarns, such as that African tribes make war on one another to get salt; that minor campaigns of the American Civil War were focused on salt mines; and that all herbivorous animals are ravenous for salt. I do not remember seeing a critical appendix to any of these views, suggesting for instance, that Negro tribes also make war about things which no one ever said were biological essentials of life; that tobacco was a factor in Civil War campaigns without being a dietetic essential; and that members of the deer family in Maine which never have salt or show desire for it, are as healthy as those in Montana which devour quantities of it and are forever seeking more.

A belief I was destined to find crucial in my Arctic work, making the difference between success and failure, life and death, was the view that man cannot live on meat alone. The few doctors and dietitians who thought you could were considered unorthodox if not charlatans. The arguments ranged from metaphysics to chemistry: Man was not intended to be carnivorous – you knew that from examining his teeth, his stomach, and the account of him in the Bible. As mentioned, he would get scurvy if he had no vegetables in meat. The kidneys would be ruined by overwork. There would be protein poisoning and, in general hell to pay.

With these views in my head and, deplorably, a number of others like them, I resigned my position as assistant instructor in anthropology at Harvard to become anthropologist of a polar expedition. Through circumstances and accidents which are not a part of the story, I found myself that autumn the guest of the Mackenzie River Eskimos.

The Hudson’s Bay Company, whose most northerly post was at Fort McPherson two hundred miles to the south had had little influence on the Eskimos during more than half a century; for it was only some of them who made annual visits to the trading post; and then they purchased no food but only tea, tobacco, ammunition and things of that sort. But in 1889 the whaling fleet had begun to cultivate these waters and for fifteen years there had been close association with sometimes as many as a dozen ships and four to five hundred men wintering at Herschel Island, just to the west of the delta. During this time a few of the Eskimos had learned some English and perhaps one in ten of them had grown to a certain extent fond of white man’s foods.

But now the whaling fleet was gone because the bottom had dropped out of the whalebone market, and the district faced an old-time winter of fish and water. The game, which might have supplemented the fish some years earlier, had been exterminated or driven away by the intensive hunting that supplied meat to the whaling fleet. There was a little tea, but not nearly enough to see the Eskimos through the winter – this was the only element of the white man’s dietary of which they were really fond and the lack of which would worry them. So I was facing a winter of fish without tea. For the least I could do, an uninvited guest, was to pretend a dislike for it.

The issue of fish and water against fish and tea was, in any case, to me six against a half dozen. For I had had a prejudice against fish all my life. I had nibbled at it perhaps once or twice a year at course dinners, always deciding that it was as bad as I thought. This was pure psychology of course, but I did not realize it.

I was in a measure adopted into an Eskimo family the head of which knew English. He had grown up as a cabin boy on a whaling ship and was called Roxy, though his name was Memoranna. It was early September, we were living in tents, the days were hot but it had begun to freeze during the nights, which were now dark for six to eight hours.

The community of three or four families, fifteen or twenty individuals, was engaged in fishing. With long poles, three or four nets were shoved out from the beach about one hundred yards apart. When the last net was out the first would be pulled in, with anything from dozens to hundreds of fish, mostly ranging in weight from one to three pounds, and including some beautiful salmon trout. From knowledge of other white men the Eskimos consider these to be most suitable for me and would cook them specially, roasting them against the fire. They themselves ate boiled fish.

Trying to develop an appetite, my habit was to get up soon after daylight, say four o’clock, shoulder my rifle, and go off after breakfasts on a hunt south across the rolling prairie, though I scarcely expected to find any game. About the middle of the afternoon I would return to camp. Children at play usually saw me coming and reported to Roxy’s wife, who would then put a fresh salmon trout to roast. When I got home I would nibble at it and write in my diary what a terrible time I was having.

Against my expectation, and almost against my will, I was beginning to like the baked salmon trout when one day of perhaps the second week I arrived home without the children having seen me coming. There was no baked fish ready but the camp was sitting round troughs of boiled fish. I joined them and, to my surprise, liked it better than the baked. There after the special cooking ceased, and I ate boiled fish with the Eskimos.

Part II

By midwinter I had left my cabin-boy host and, for the purposes of anthropological study, was living with a less sophisticated family at the eastern edge of the Mackenzie delta. Our dwelling was a house of wood and earth, heated and lighted with Eskimo-style lamps. They burned seal or whale oil, mostly white whale from a hunt of the previous spring when the fat had been stored in bags and preserved, although the lean meat had been eaten. Our winter cooking however, was not done over the lamps but on a sheet-iron stove which had been obtained from whalers. There were twenty-three of us living in one room, and there were sometimes as many as ten visitors. The floor was then so completely covered with sleepers that the stove had to be suspended from the ceiling. The temperature at night was round 60*F. The ventilation was excellent through cold air coming up slowly from below by way of a trap door that was never closed and the heated air going out by a ventilator in the roof.

Everyone slept completely naked – no pajama or night shirts. We used cotton or woolen blankets which had been obtained from the whalers and from the Hudson’s Bay Company.

In the morning, about seven o’clock, winter-caught fish, frozen so hard that they would break like glass, were brought in to lie on the floor till they began to soften a little. One of the women would pinch them every now and then until, when she found her finger indented them slightly, she would begin preparations for breakfast. First she cut off the head and put them aside to be boiled for the children in the afternoon (Eskimos are fond of children, and heads are considered the best part of the fish). Next best are the tails, which are cut off and saved for the children also. The woman would then slit the skin along the back and also along the belly and getting hold with her teeth, would strip the fish somewhat as we peel a banana, only sideways where we peel bananas, endways.

Thus prepared, the fish were put on dishes and passed around. Each of us took one and gnawed it about as an American does corn on the cob. An American leaves the cob; similarly we ate the flesh from the outside of the fish, not touching the entrails. When we had eaten as much as we chose, we put the rest on a tray for dog feed.

After breakfast all the men and about half the women would go fishing, the rest of the women staying at home to keep house. About eleven o’clock we came back for a second meal of frozen fish just like the breakfast. At about four in the afternoon the working day was over and we came home to a meal of hot boiled fish.

Also we came home to a dwelling so heated by the cooking that the temperature would range from 85* to 100*F. or perhaps even higher – more like our idea of a Turkish bath than a warm room. Streams of perspiration would run down our bodies, and the children were kept busy going back and forth with dippers of cold water of which we naturally drank great quantities.

Just before going to sleep we would have a cold snack of fish that had been left over from dinner. Then we slept seven or eight hours and the routine of the day began once more.

After some three months as a guest of the Eskimos I had acquired most of their food tastes. I had to agree that fish is better boiled than cooked any other way, and that the heads (which we occasionally shared with the children) were the best part of the fish. I no longer desired variety in the cooking, such as occasional baking – I preferred it always boils if it was cooked. I had become as fond of raw fish as if I had been a Japanese. I like fermented (therefore slightly acid) whale oil with my fish as well as ever I liked mixed vinegar and olive oil with a salad. But I still had two reservations against Eskimo practice; I did not eat rotten fish and I longed for salt with my meals.

There were several grades of decayed fish. The August catch had been protected by longs from animals but not from heat and was outright rotten. The September catch was mildly decayed. The October and later catches had been frozen immediately and were fresh. There was less of the August fish than of any other and, for that reason among the rest, it was a delicacy – eaten sometimes as a snack between meals, sometimes as a kind of dessert and always frozen, raw.

In midwinter it occurred to me to philosophize that in our own and foreign lands taste for a mild cheese is somewhat plebeian; it is at least a semi-truth that connoisseurs like their cheeses progressively stronger. The grading applies to meats, as in England where it is common among nobility and gentry to like game and pheasant so high that the average Midwestern American or even Englishman of a lower class, would call them rotten.

I knew of course that, while it is good form to eat decayed milk products and decayed game, it is very bad form to eat decayed fish. I knew also that the view of our populace that there are likely to be “ptomaines” in decaying fish and in the plebeian meats; but it struck me as an improbable extension of the class-consciousness that ptomaines would avoid the gentleman’s food and attack that of a commoner.

These thoughts led to a summarizing query; If it is almost a mark of social distinction to be able to eat strong cheeses with a straight face and smelly birds with relish, why is it necessarily a low taste to be fond of decaying fish? On that basis of philosophy, though with several qualms, I tried the rotten fish one day, and if memory servers, like it better than my first taste of Camembert. During the next weeks I became fond of rotten fish.

About the fourth month of my first Eskimo winter I was looking forward to every meal (rotten or fresh), enjoying them, and feeling comfortable when they were over. Still I kept thinking the boiled fish would taste better if only I had salt. From the beginning of my Eskimo residence I had suffered from this lack. On one of the first few days, with the resourcefulness of a Boy Scout, I had decided to make myself some salt, and had boiled sea water till there was left only a scum of brown powder. If I had remembered as vividly my freshman chemistry as I did the books about shipwrecked adventurers, I should have know in advance that the sea contains a great many chemicals besides sodium chloride, among them iodine. The brown scum tasted bitter rather than salty. A better chemist could no doubt have refined the product. I gave it up, partly through the persuasion of my host, the English-speaking Roxy.

The Mackenzie Eskimos, Roxy told me, believe that what is good for grown people is good for children and enjoyed by them as soon as they get used to it. Accordingly they teach the use of tobacco when a child is very young. It then grows to maturity with the idea that you can’t get along without tobacco. But, said Roxy, the whalers have told that many whites get along without it, and he had himself seen white men who never use it, while the few white women, wives of captains, none used tobacco. (This, remember, was in 1906.)

Now Roxy had heard that white people believe that salt is good for, and even necessary for children, so they begin early to add salt to the child’s food. That child then would grow up with the same attitude toward salt as an Eskimo has toward tobacco. However, said Roxy, since we Eskimos were mistaken in thinking tobacco so necessary, may it be that the white men are mistaken about salt? Pursuing the argument, he concluded that the reason why all Eskimos dislike salted food and all white men like it was not racial but due to custom. You could then, break the salt habit as easily as the tobacco habit and you would suffer no ill result beyond the mental discomfort of the first few days or weeks.

Roxy did not know, but I did as an anthropologist, that in pre-Columbian times salt was unknown or the taste of it disliked and the use of it avoided through much of North and South America. It may possibly be true that the carnivorous Eskimos in whose language the word salty, mamaitok, is synonymous with with evil-tasting, disliked salt more intensely than those Indians who were partly herbivorous. Nevertheless, it is clear that the salt habit spread more slowly through the New World from the Europeans than the tobacco habit through Europe from the Indians. Even today there are considerable areas, for instance in the Amazon basin, where the natives still abhor salt. Not believing that the races differ in their basic natures, I felt inclined to agree with Roxy that the practice of slating food is with us a social inheritance and the belief in its merits a part of our folklore.

Through this philosophizing I was somewhat reconciled to going without salt, but I was nevertheless, overjoyed when one day Ovayuak, my new host in the eastern delta, came indoors to say that a dog team was approaching which he believed to be that of Ilavinirk, a man who had worked with whalers and who possessed a can of salt. Sure enough, it was Ilavinirk, and he was delighted to give me the salt, a half-pound baking-powder can about half full, which he said he had been carrying around for two or three years, hoping sometime to meet someone who would like it for a present. He seemed almost as pleased to find that I wanted the salt as I was to get it. I sprinkled some on my boiled fish, enjoyed it tremendously, and wrote in my diary that it was the best meal I had had all winter. Then I put the can under my pillow, in the Eskimo way of keeping small and treasured things. But at the next meal I had almost finished eating before I remembered the salt. Apparently then my longing for it had been what you might call imaginary. I finished without salt, tried it at one or two meals during the next few days and thereafter left it untouched. When we moved camp the salt remained behind.

After the return of the sun I made a journey of several hundred miles to the ship Narwhal which, contrary to our expectations of the late summer, had really come in and wintered at Herschel Island. The captain was George P. Leavitt, of Portland, Maine. For the few days of my visit I enjoyed the excellent New England cooking, but when I left Herschel Island I returned without reluctance to the Eskimo meals of fish and cold water. It seemed to me that, mentally and physically, I had never been in better health in my life.

Part III

During the first few months of my first year in the Arctic, I acquired, though I did not at the time fully realize it, the munitions of fact and experience which have within my own mind defeated those views of dietetics reviewed at the beginning of this article. I could be healthy on a diet of fish and water. The longer I followed it the better I liked it, which meant, at least inferentially and provisionally, that you never become tired of your food if you have only one thing to eat. I did not get scurvy on the fish diet nor learn that any of my fish-eating friends ever had it. Nor was the freedom from scurvy due to the fish being eaten raw – we proved that later. (What it was due to we shall deal with in the second article of this series.) There were certainly no signs of hardening of the arteries and high blood pressure, of breakdown of the kidneys or of rheumatism.

These months on fish were the beginning of several years during which I lived on an exclusive meat diet. For I count in fish when I speak of living on meat, using “meat” and “meat diet” more as a professor of anthropology than as the editor of a housekeeping magazine. The term in this article and in like scientific discussions refers to a diet from which all things of the vegetable kingdom are absent.

To the best of my estimate then, I have lived in the Arctic for more than five years exclusively on meat and water. (This was not, of course, one five-year stretch, but an aggregate of that much time during ten years.) One member of my expeditions, Storker Storkersen, lived on an exclusive meat diet for about the same length of time while there are several who have lived on it from one to three years. These have been of many nationalities and of three races – ordinary European whites; natives of the Cape Verde Islands, who had a large percentage of Negro blood; and natives of the South Sea Islands. Neither from experience with my own men nor from what I have heard of similar cases do I find any racial difference. There are marked individual differences.

The typical method of breaking a party into a meat diet is that three of five of us leave in midwinter a base camp which has nearly or quite the best type of European mixed diet that money and forethought can provide. The novices have been told that it is possible to live on meat alone. We warn them that it is hard to get used to for the first few weeks, but assure them that eventually they will grow to like it and that any difficulties in changing diets will be due to their imagination.

These assertions the men will believe to a varying degree. I have a feeling that in the course of breaking in something like twenty individuals; two or three young men believed me completely, and that this belief collaborated strongly with their youth and adaptability in making them take readily to the meat.

Usually I think, the men believe that what I tell of myself is true for me personally, but that I am peculiar, a freak – that a normal person will not react similarly, and that they are going to be normal and have an awful time. Their past experience seems to tell them that if you eat one thing every day you are bound to tire of it. In the back of their minds there is also what they have read and heard about the necessity for a varied diet. They have specific fears of developing the ailments which they have heard of as caused by meat or prevented by vegetables.

We secure our food in the Arctic by hunting and in midwinter there is not enough good hunting light. Accordingly we carry with us from the base camp provisions for several weeks, enough to take us into the long days. During this time, as we travel away from shore, we occasionally kill a seal or a polar bear and eat their meat along with our groceries. Our men like these as an element of a mixed diet as well as you do beef or mutton.

We are not on rations. We eat all we want, and we feed the dogs what we think is good for them. When the traveling conditions are right we usually have two big meals a day, morning and evening, but when we are storm bound or delayed by open water we eat several meals to pass the time away. At the end of four, six or eight weeks at sea, we have used up all our food. We do not try to save a few delicacies to eat with the seal and bear, for experience has proved that such things are only tantalizing.

Suddenly, then we are on nothing but seal. For while our food at sea averages ten percent polar bear there may be months in which we don’t see a bear. The men go at the seal loyally; they are volunteers and whatever the suffering, they have bargained for it and intend to grin and bear it. For a day or two they eat square meals. Then the appetite begins to flag and they discover as they had more than half expected, that for them personally it is going to be a hard pull or a failure. Some own up that they can’t eat, while others pretend to have good appetites, enlisting the surreptitious help of a dog to dispose of their share. In extreme cases, which are usually those of the middle-aged and conservative they go two or three days practically or entirely without eating. We had no weighing apparatus; but I take it that some have lost anything from ten to twenty pounds, what with the hard work on empty stomachs. They become gloomy and grouchy and, as I once wrote, “They begin to say to each other, and sometimes to me, things about their judgment in joining a polar expedition that I cannot quote.”

But after a few days even the conservatives begin to nibble at the seal meat, after a few more they are eating a good deal of it, rather under protest and at the end of three or four weeks they are eating square meals, though still talking about their willingness to give a soul or right arm for this or that. Amusingly, or perhaps instructively, they often long for ham and eggs or corned beef when, according to theory, they ought to be longing for vegetables and fruits. Some of them do hanker particularly for things like sauerkraut or orange juice; but more usually it is for hot cakes and syrup or bread and butter.

There are two ways in which to look at an abrupt change of diet – how difficult it is to get used to what you have to eat and how hard it is to be deprived of things you are used to and like. From the second angle, I take it to be physiologically significant that we have found our people, when deprived, to long equally for things which have been considered necessities of health, such as salt; for things where a drug addiction is considered to be involved, such as tobacco; and for items of that class of so-called staple foods, such as bread.

It has happened on several trips, and with an aggregate of perhaps twenty men, that they have had to break at one time their salt, tobacco, and bread habits. I have frequently tried the experiment of asking which they would prefer; salt for their meal, bread with it, or tobacco for an after-dinner smoke. In nearly every case the men have stopped to consider, nor do I recall that they were ever unanimous.

When we are returning to the ship after several months on meat and water, I usually say that the steward will have orders to cook separately for each member of the party all he wants of whatever he wants. Especially during the last two or three days, there is a great deal of talk among the novices in the part about what the choices are to be. One man wants a big dish of mashed potatoes and gravy; another a gallon of coffee and bread and butter; a third perhaps wants a stack of hot cakes with syrup and butter.

On reaching the ship each does get all he wants of what he wants. The food tastes good, although not quite so superlative as they had imagined. They have said they are going to eat a lot and they do. Then they get indigestion, headache, feel miserable, and within a week, in nine cases out of ten of those who have been on meat six months or over, they are willing to go back to meat again. If a man does not want to take part in a second sledge journey it is usually for a reason other than the dislike of meat.

Still, as just implied, the verdict depends on how long you have been on the diet. If at the end of the first ten days our men could have been miraculously rescued from the seal and brought back to their varied foods, most of them would have sworn forever after that they were about to die when rescued, and they would have vowed never to taste seal again – vows which would have been easy to keep for no doubt in such cases the thought of seal, even years later, would have been accompanied by a feeling of revulsion. If a man has been on meat exclusively for only three or four months he may or may not be reluctant to go back to it again. But if the period has been six months or over, I remember no one who was unwilling to go back to meat. Moreover, those who have gone without vegetables for an aggregate of several years usually thereafter eat a larger percentage of meat than your average citizen, if they can afford it.

http://www.biblelife.org/stefansson1.html

WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED

Dr Tom Cowan has just done a great podcast that goes beyond his usual health related topics and exposes some of the other big scams.

 https://odysee.com/@Dr.TomCowan:8/8.14.24:e

After discussing the myth of oil being a "fossil fuel" he exposes the lie of "nuclear bombs"  including Bikini Atoll testing, and then gets in the massive scams of "government" and "disease" - Great stuff!

Petition Against Fluoride in NZ

The Stop Fluoridation Petition is live. Fluoride Free New Zealand launched a parliamentary petition on the 2nd of August 2024 to stop water fluoridation in New Zealand. Let's go big with this!

Although the NZ government is primarily focused on control rather than health, signing this petition may encourage them to stop poisoning us with fluoride, and it only takes a few seconds so we might as well give it a crack😵‍💫

Go to the link below and sign the petition:

https://fluoridefree.org.nz/parliamentary-petition-stop.../

Bone pain, joint pain, arthritis or fluoride poisoning

Most people don’t realise that 50% of fluoride ingested is stored in the bones and soft tissue. Accumulation of fluoride can cause a disease called skeletal fluorosis. The first symptoms of skeletal fluorosis are identical to osteoarthritis.

 
“Long-term accumulative exposures to fluoride even at low levels carries a risk of sub-clinical or stage-1 musculo-skeletal fluorosis presenting as joint pain or arthritis. Notably, arthritis is a leading cause of disability with 647,000 now affected in this country and annual costs exceeding $3 billion.” Dr Mike Godfrey, Journal New Zealand Medical Association.

It is completely unknown how many people in New Zealand are suffering from skeletal fluorosis, rather than arthritis, because doctors are not aware this could happen here so testing is never done.

What we do know is that the U.S. Government’s Institute of Medicine, Dietary Reference Intakes for Calcium, Phosphorus, Magnesium, Vitamin D, and Fluoride.(1997), have estimated “The development of skeletal fluorosis and its severity is directly related to the level and duration of exposure. Most epidemiological research has indicated that an intake of at least 10 mg/day for 10 or more years is needed to produce clinical signs of the milder forms of the condition”.

In 2013, the Hamilton City Council held a Tribunal Hearing on Fluoridation. One of the expert speakers promoting fluoridation was former chief oral health advisor, and now Medical Director for Health New Zealand, Dr Robin Whyman.

Dr Whyman explained to the councillors “You then swallow the fluoride and it comes down into the blood supply. Some of it is actually moves across to bone, we don’t disagree with that at all, and some of it will go to soft tissue.” But rather than stopping there and discussing what this means for bone health, and the health of our entire bodies, Dr Whyman, a dentist, moved on to talk about dental health.

Because fluoride accumulates, less exposure over longer periods can achieve the same result as high exposure over a shorter period. The intake established by the Institute of Medicine, 10 mg a day for 10 years, may be roughly the same as 5mg a day for 20 years or 2.5 mg a day for 40 years and so on. The Institute of Medicine say “Stage 1 skeletal fluorosis is characterized by occasional stiffness or pain in joints and some osteosclerosis of the pelvis and vertebra.” 

Could your bone or joint pain be caused by fluoride accumulating in your bones? Try avoiding all forms of fluoride. See Sources of Fluoride and New Zealand study on Fluoride and Tea.

“If I was an arthritic individual, I would be eliminating every source of fluoride exposure I could think of”. Phyllis Mullinex, PhD. 

Watch short video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwLAcR85iG4

https://fluoridefree.org.nz/bone-pain-joint-pain.../

 

 

Eat ze bugs

A Swedish company called Tebrito has been aiming to produce mealworms for insect proteins to put in human food like granola and protein bars. They got $4.2 million in investments to push this toxic "food".

 Now they have gone bankrupt because nobody wants to eat insects. In 2023 they only had a revenue of $49000 and lost almost $12.6 million.

In other words, nobody is buying their insects. People are REJECTING the globalist agenda.
 

And last week another Swedish company called Mycorena also went bankrupt. They got $27.8 million in investments to produce 3D printed fake meat made out of mycelium.
It is clear that even in liberal Sweden, people do not want to eat fake food.

Go woke, go broke.

 

Fluoridation is not about children’s teeth

Fluoridation is not about “children’s teeth,” it is about industry getting rid of its hazardous waste at a profit, instead of having to pay a fortune to dispose of it.

Only calcium fluoride occurs naturally in water; however, that type of fluoride has never been used for fluoridation. Instead what is used over 90 percent of the time are silicofluorides, which are 85 times more toxic than calcium fluoride.They are non-biodegradable, hazardous waste products that come straight from the pollution scrubbers of big industries. 

If not dumped in the public water supplies, these silicofluorides would have to be neutralized at the highest rated hazardous waste facility at a cost of $1.40 per gallon (or more depending on how much cadmium, lead, uranium and arsenic are also present). Cities buy these unrefined pollutants and dump them–lead, arsenic and all–into our water systems. Silicofluorides are almost as toxic as arsenic, and more toxic than lead.1, 2

The EPA has recently said it is vitally important that we lower the level of both lead and arsenic in our water supplies, and their official goal is zero parts per million. This being the case, why would anyone recommend adding silicofluorides, which contain both of these heavy metals?3

On July 2, 1997, EPA scientist, J. William Hirzy, PhD, stated, “Our members’ review of the body of evidence over the last eleven years, including animal and human epidemiology studies, indicate a causal link between fluoride/fluoridation and cancer, genetic damage, neurological impairment and bone pathology. Of particular concern are recent epidemiology studies linking fluoride exposure to lowered IQ in children.”4

The largest study of tooth decay in America (by the National Institute of Dental Research in 1987) proved that there was no significant difference in the decay rates of 39,000 fluoridated, partially fluoridated and non-fluoridated children, ages 5 to 17, surveyed in 84 cities. The media has never disclosed these facts. The study cost us, the taxpayers, $3,670,000. Surely, we are entitled to hear the results.5

Newburgh and Kingston, both in the state of New York, were two of the original fluoridation test cities. A recent study by the New York State Department of Health showed that after 50 years of fluoridation, Newburgh’s children have a slightly higher number of cavities than never-fluoridated Kingston.5

The recent California fluoridation study, sponsored by the Dental Health Foundation, showed that California has only about one quarter as much water fluoridation as the nation as a whole, yet 15-year-old California children have less tooth decay than the national average.6
From the day the Public Health Service completed their original 10-year Newburgh and Kingston fluoridation experiment, fluoride promoters have repeatedly claimed that fluoride added to drinking water can reduce tooth decay by as much as 60 to 70 percent.

Adding fluoride to the water has never prevented tooth decay, it merely delays it, by provoking a genetic malfunction that causes teeth to erupt later than normal. This delay makes it possible to read the statistics incorrectly without lying. Proponents count teeth that have not yet erupted as “no decay.” Therefore, they claimed that the fluoridated Newburgh children age 6 had 100 percent less tooth decay; by age 7, 100 percent less; by age 8, 67 percent less; age 9, 50 percent less; and by age 10, 40 percent less.

Obviously, the only reduction that really counted was the 40 percent by age 10, but the Public Health Service totaled the five reductions shown, then divided by 5 to obtain what they called “an over-all reduction of 70 percent.”

Had the Health Department continued their survey beyond age 10, they would have found that the percentage of reduction continued down hill to 30, 20, 0, and eventually the children drinking fluoridated water had more cavities–not less. The rate of decay is identical, once the children’s teeth erupt. In other words, this “65 percent less dental decay” is just a statistical illusion. It never happened!7

EPA scientists recently concluded, after studying all the evidence, that the public water supply should not be used “as a vehicle for disseminating this toxic and prophylatically useless. . . substance.” They felt there should be “an immediate halt to the use of the nation’s drinking water reservoirs as disposal sites for the toxic waste of the phosphate fertilizer industry.” Unfortunately, the management of the EPA sides not with their own scientists, but with industry on this issue.8

There is less tooth decay in the nation as a whole today than there used to be, but decay rates have also dropped in the non-fluoridated areas of the United States and in Europe where fluoridation of water is rare. The Pasteur Institute and the Nobel Institute have already caused fluoride to be banned in their countries (France and Sweden). In fact, most developed countries have banned, stopped or rejected fluoridation.9

Several recent studies, here and abroad, show that fluoridation is correlated with higher rather than lower rates of caries. There has been no study that shows any cost-saving by fluoridation. This claim has been researched by a Rand corporation study and found to be “simply not warranted by available evidence.”10In fact, dentists make 17 percent more profit in fluoridated areas as opposed to non-fluoridated areas.11 There are no savings.

Meanwhile, the incidence of dental fluorosis has skyrocketed. It is not just a “cosmetic effect.” Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary says: “Fluorosis is poisoning by fluorides.” Today, in North America, there is an increased prevalence of dental fluorosis, ranging from about 15 percent to 65 percent in fluoridated areas and 5 percent to 40 percent in non-fluoridated areas.12 African-American children experience twice the rate of dental fluorosis as white children and it tends to be more severe.13 The widespread and uncontrolled use of fluoride in our water, dental products, foods and beverages (grown and processed in fluoridated communities) is causing pervasive over-exposure to fluoride in the U.S. population.
 

A 1995 American Dental Association (ADA) chart shows that a certain fluoride drug should not be given to children under six months of age. It also shows that if fluoride is put into water, all children under six years of age will be getting an overdose.14

The FDA states that fluoride is a prescription drug, not a mineral nutrient. Who has the right to put a prescription drug in the water supply where there can be no control of dosage? People who drink a lot of water, like diabetics and athletes, will be overdosed, and studies have proven that 1 percent of the people are allergic to fluoridated water. Today, an unusual number of children in non-fluoridated areas are developing dental fluorosis!

Even if fluoride were good for teeth, shouldn’t the water be as safe as possible for everyone? Why should those who are against it be forced to drink it? What has happened to “Freedom of Choice?” We all know that fluoride is not “just one of forty chemicals used to treat water,” it is the only chemical added to treat the people! It is compulsory medication, which is unconstitutional. There are other alternatives that do not infringe on the rights of all consumers to choose their own form of medication.16

When the people have been given a chance to vote on this issue, more often than not, they have voted “no.” In the majority of cases, nationwide, it is the local city council that has forced it on the people. Fluoride promoters find it much easier to convince a few city council members than the general public. Here in America, we shouldn’t have to fight to keep a hazardous waste out of our water supply!

Bottom line: There are no benefits to fluoridation. We actually pay the phosphate fertilizer industries for their crude hazardous waste. Fluoridation contributes to many health problems and hither dental bills, and causes more (not less) suffering. Only big business wins with fluoridation–not our children (or us).

On Nov. 24, 1992, Robert Carton, PhD, a former EPA scientist, made this statement: Fluoridation is the greatest case of scientific fraud of this century, if not of all time. Impossible? No, it’s not–look at how many years millions of people were fooled by the tobacco industries!

References

    George Glasser, Journalist, St. Petersburg, FL, “Fluoridation: A Mandate to Dump Toxic Waste in the Name of Public Health,” July 22, 1991.
    R.E. Gosselin et al, Clinical Toxicology of commercial Products, 5th ed., 1984. U.S. EPA Maximum Contaminant Levels (MCL) EPA/NSF Standard 60.
    San Diego Union Tribune, May 25, 2000, “EPA proposes stricter rules for arsenic levels in water supplies,” and Associated Press, Jan. 17, 2001, “EPA Orders Sharp Reduction in Arsenic Levels in Drinking Water,” by H. Josef Hebert.
    Letter of July 2, 1997, from J. William Hirzy, Ph.D. to Jeff Green. The union (now NTEU, Chapter 280) consists of and represents all of the toxicologists, chemists, biologists and other professionals at EPA headquarters, Washington, D.C.
    “New studies cast doubt on fluoridation benefits,” by Bette Hileman, Chemical & Engineering News,Vol. 67, No. 19, May 8, 1989. “Recommendations for Fluoride Use in Children,” Jayanth V. Kumar, D.D.S., M.P.H.; Elmer L. Green, D.D.S., M.P.H., Pediatric Dentistry, Feb. 1998.
    San Diego Union Tribune, Sept. 1, 1999.
    Konstatin K. Paluev, Research and Development Engineer, “Fluoridation Benefits–Statistical Illusion,” testimony before the New York City Board of Estimate, Mar. 6, 1957.
    J. William Hirzy, EPA Union Vice-President, “Why EPA’s Headquarters Union of Scientists Opposes Fluoridation,” May 1, 1999.
    Mark Diesendorf, “The mystery of declining tooth decay,” Nature, July 10, 1986, pp. 125-29.
    “The Truth About Mandatory Fluoridation,” John R. Lee, M.D. Apr. 15, 1995.
    The Journal of the American Dental Association, Vol. 84, Feb. 1972.
    K.E. Heller, et al, Journal of Public Health Dentistry, Vol. 57: No. 3 Summer 1997.
    National Research Council, “Health Effects of Ingested Fluoride,” 1993, p. 44.
    Pediatrics, May 1998, Vol. 95, Number 5.
    Food and Drug Administration letter dated Aug. 15, 1963.
    Abbot Laboratories, Scientific Divisions, North Chicago, IL, June 18, 1963.

https://www.westonaprice.org/.../fluoridation-the.../...

The Absurdities of Fluoridation

 

1. Promoters say fluoride works on the outside of the teeth but then say everyone must have it in their drinking water.

2. Even though fluoridation chemicals are added to the water supply for a claimed therapeutic purpose, they are exempt from the Medicines Act. Fluoride pills, fluoride toothpaste and fluoride mouthwashes are not exempt.

3.Fluoridation chemicals are too toxic to be allowed to be released into the air so are captured in the smokestacks of the phosphate fertiliser industry. This highly toxic substance cannot be disposed of in streams, rivers or the sea but can be added to the public water supply with the claim that it reduces dental decay, so ultimately ends up in streams, rivers and the sea anyway (except what is retained in people’s bones and soft tissue).

 
4.All medications have an established safe dosage (i.e. mg per kilo per day) and are prescribed accordingly. But this isn't the case for the highly toxic fluoridation chemicals. Dose varies depending on how much water someone drinks regardless of age, weight, health status, dental health or even if they have teeth. 

5.Fluoridation forces bottle fed babies to consume 200 times more than they would have received through breast milk because the mother's body screens out just about all fluoride. It is logical to assume that there must be a good reason for this.

6. A tube of fluoride toothpaste comes with a warning not to swallow, yet the fluoridation chemicals are added to water for everyone to consume. 

7.Fluoride is added to water under the guise of reducing dental decay in some children yet everyone is forced to consume it with the claim that it may help someone else’s teeth.

8. Fluoridation allows the Government to do to everyone what a doctor cannot do to an individual patient – prescribe medication without informed consent. 

9. We are told the dose is too small to cause harm to anyone but large enough to be of benefit to everyone.

The Case Against Fluoride

The Case Against Fluoride: How Hazardous Waste Ended Up in Our Drinking Water and the Bad Science and Powerful Politics that Keep it There

By Paul Connett, PhD, James Beck, MD, PhD, & H.S. Micklem, DPhil
Chelsea Green Publishing, 2010

On the label of every tube of fluoride toothpaste is a statement which reads, “Drug Facts: Active Ingredient—Sodium Fluoride … Keep out of reach of children under six years of age. If more than used for brushing is accidentally swallowed, get medical help or contact a Poison Control Center right away.” The amount recommended for brushing is about the size of a pea. This pea-sized dab contains about the same amount of fluoride as one glass of water in areas that fluoridate the water. Do you drink the recommended eight glasses of water per day? Do you call the Poison Control Center when you do?

The insanity of intentional water fluoridation is examined from every angle in this book. International law forbids dumping fluoride waste into the sea but it is accepted in American drinking water. As stated in the toothpaste disclaimer above, the FDA officially considers fluoride to be a drug. This drug has never been approved by the FDA. Contaminating drinking water with fluoride can be most charitably characterized as an experiment which violates the Nuremburg Code prohibiting experimental human treatment without informed consent. China, India, Japan and most of Europe do not fluoridate their water.

 One of the first studies claiming the safety of fluoride was done by Cox and Hodge. Cox worked for the giant aluminum company Alcoa. At that time fluoride was a major waste product of aluminum processing. It must have seemed like a wondrous miracle when Cox discovered that this toxic waste was safe and effective for preventing tooth decay when added to the water supply. The real miracle is that so many people apparently believe this. Hodge worked on the Manhattan Project supervising experiments on unsuspecting patients who were injected with uranium and plutonium. These guys have all the credibility of those famous leading scholars named Larry, Curly and Moe. If you believe the studies and health advice of Cox and Hodge, you might want to consider cutting back on eating those old lead-based paint chips.

Many other studies are reviewed, such as those of Dr. Phyllis Mullenix, who not only had no conflict of interest with the commercial entities involved but in fact suffered professionally for daring to suggest that fluoride might be problematic.

John Colquhoun of New Zealand promoted fluoride enthusiastically around the country for years. After traveling the world to survey the effects of fluoride, he realized he was quite wrong. Colquhoun was a man of rare courage and integrity, and spent the rest of his life trying to undo the damage he had done.

 When the National Research Council came out with a report—over five hundred pages long—unfavorable to fluoride, the American Dental Association took less than one day to dismiss it. The Centers for Disease Control rejected it six days later. The director of Quackwatch called fluoride opponents “poison-mongers.” The irony piles pretty high when you consider that most opponents are unpaid and do much of this on their own dime, they have nothing to monger or sell, and are trying to remove the poison, not add it.

Toward the end of the book the authors pull out one of my all-time favorite quotes from the late Michael Crichton. “Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled….The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. . . There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus.

This article appeared in Wise Traditions in Food, Farming and the Healing Arts, the quarterly magazine of the Weston A. Price Foundation, Spring 2011.

 

Fluoride impairs brain development

Fluoride is lowering the IQ of all New Zealanders - that is the real reason it is being added to the water supply.

In May 2023, the U.S. Government’s National Toxicology Program (NTP) released a 6 year scientific review of fluoride and IQ. The Review contained a monograph and a meta-analysis. The meta-analysis found lower IQ with fluoride exposure, demonstrating remarkable consistency. Of the 19 studies rated higher quality, 18 found lowering of IQ.

The NTP authors said: “We have no basis on which to state that our findings are not relevant to some children or pregnant women in the United States” and that “Several of the highest quality studies showing lower IQs in children were done in fluoridated (0.7 mg/L) areas…many urinary fluoride measurements exceed those that would be expected from consuming water that contains fluoride at 1.5 mg/L.”

In New Zealand water is fluoridated at a higher level than in the U.S. and Canada. The maximum for fluoridation in those countries is 0.7 ppm (i.e. 0.7 mg/L). The New Zealand Ministry of Health recommends that water be fluoridated in a range between 0.7 and 1ppm. Most councils aim for the median of 0.85ppm but testing results from councils around the country has found that many of them are often fluoridating above 0.85ppm. This is a significant increase compared with the North American countries and therefore we can expect that the loss of IQ in New Zealand children is likely to be worse.

The evidence is growing stronger. Even since the NTP review was originally completed, there have been more U.S. Government funded studies published which have found harm to the developing brain.

The NTP goes on to say “Research on other neurotoxicants has shown that subtle shifts in IQ at the population level can have a profound impact on the number of people who fall within the high and low ranges of the population’s IQ distribution. For example a 5-point decrease in a population’s IQ would nearly double the number of people classified as intellectually disabled.

This means that every year in New Zealand thousands of babies have their brain development impaired directly as a result of fluoridation

 

Fluoride turns men into eunuchs

Fluoride added to water makes circus animals calm and prisoners docile. Now we know the reason. A search for “fluoride” and “testosterone” turns up dozens of studies showing adverse effects, such as “Effects of sodium fluoride and sulfur dioxide on sperm motility and serum testosterone in male rats,” “Sodium fluoride disrupts testosterone biosynthesis by affecting the steroidogenic pathway in TM3 Leydig cells” and “Fluoride toxicity in the male reproductive system.” 

 

It’s mostly Chinese research­ers who are looking at this problem. A group from Shanxi, China, led by Jiahai Zhang investigated what happened to rats when given sodium fluoride in their drinking water (and also exposed to sulfur dioxide in the air) for eight consecu­tive weeks. Exposure to fluoride with sulfur dioxide but also to fluoride alone adversely affected testis tissue and serum testosterone levels in rats. 

Addition of fluoride—a toxic waste—to drinking water should be banned worldwide, but of course there is resistance, because then the industries pro­ducing it (such as the fertilizer industry) would have to engage in the expensive process of cleaning it up.

 

 

Water Fluoridation by Paul Connett

The Latest Science Indicates That the Practice Must Stop

Water fluoridation is the deliberate addition of a substance containing, or yielding, fluoride (that is, in the form of the free fluoride ion) to the public water supply with the ostensible aim of reducing tooth decay. The concentrations of fluoride used for this purpose in the U.S. range from 0.7 to 1.2 milligrams of fluoride per liter of water (0.7-1.2 parts per million or ppm). When the practice began in the U.S. and Canada in 1945 there were no published studies available which demonstrated that consuming fluoride at these levels was safe.

Without any formal study, it was assumed that because some people in some places had consumed natural fluoride levels higher than 1 ppm for many years, with no “apparent” harm recorded, adding fluoride to water would be safe.

The authors both work for the Fluoride Action Network (FAN),¹ a nonprofit dedicated to education and sharing information on the toxicity of fluoride. FAN maintains the largest database dedicated to fluoride’s toxicity on blood,² bone,³ brain,⁴ heart,⁵ kidney,⁶ liver,⁷ lung,⁸ the reproductive system,⁹ and the thyroid gland;¹⁰ as well as the largest collection of news articles on fluoride¹¹ that are accessible by country, by state for the U.S. and by province for Canada. The website also contains links to many videotaped interviews,¹² government reports by country,¹³ fluoride industrial emissions by state¹⁴ and more.

NEITHER ETHICAL NOR SCIENTIFIC

It was neither ethical nor scientific to force people to consume fluoride in 1945, and it is not ethical or scientific to do it today. The arguments get stronger as U.S. authorities are finally getting around to doing the studies on tissues that they should have conducted many years ago—and should have done before they started what has amounted to one of the largest public health experiments in U.S. history.

PROTECTING A BELIEF SYSTEM

The dilemma for those who believe that this practice is causing harm is how to end it when most people don’t even know their water is being fluoridated and don’t know the potential risks it may be posing to their children. Sadly, most doctors and dentists simply follow the policies of their professional bodies without reading the literature for themselves. The media are not telling the public about the latest health studies and are simply parroting statements from organizations like the American Dental Association (ADA) and agencies like the Oral Health Division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which hold a long standing “belief” in the “safety and effectiveness” of this practice. Meanwhile, government health departments at all levels appear to be more interested in protecting this outdated policy than protecting the health of our children.

The task that FAN has set itself since 2000 is to share the science about the dangers posed by this practice with those who are willing to read and listen, mainly through our web page at FluorideALERT.org and through public presentations (for example, in Seattle¹⁵). The latest science makes it very clear that the practice of fluoridation must stop!

FLUORIDE AND INTELLIGENCE

In 2006, the National Research Council (NRC) of the National Academies concluded that “fluorides have the ability to interfere with functions of the brain”¹⁶ and for the first time called fluoride an endocrine disruptor.¹⁷

In 2006, there were only five IQ studies available to the NRC panel. Subsequently, many more have been published (including studies that were previously only available in Chinese). As of 2019, we now have sixty studies, fifty-three of which have shown a lowered IQ in children in communities with high fluoride exposure compared to communities with lower fluoride exposure.¹⁸

Most of these studies have been carried out in China, but others took place in India, Iran and Mexico. In 2012, twenty-seven of these studies were subjected to a meta-analysis by a team from Harvard, which was published in one of the world’s leading environmental health journals, Environmental Health Perspectives.¹⁹ While this team had concerns about the lack of information on several possible confounding factors in many of these studies, they were struck by the consistency of the results. Even though the research was carried out over a period of twenty-one years, by many different research teams, in two countries (China and Iran) and in many different locations, twenty-six out of the twenty-seven studies found the same result: a lowering of IQ. The average lowering was seven IQ points.

It should be noted that a shift downward of five IQ points in a large population would halve the number of very bright children (IQ greater than one hundred thirty) and increase by over 50 percent the number of mentally handicapped (IQ lower than seventy). Such a downward shift would have both huge economic and social consequences for a country like the USA.

Promoters of fluoridation have done their best to diminish the significance of these findings for fluoridated communities, but recent findings have largely undermined their self-serving arguments. A rigorous U.S. government-funded study carried out by a highly qualified research team headed by Dr. Morteza Bashash confirmed that fluoride is neurotoxic at levels currently experienced in fluoridated communities and, for this effect, the most vulnerable stage of human life is during fetal development.²⁰ This study was conducted in Mexico City with two hundred ninety-nine mother-offspring pairs. The authors found strong associations between fluoride exposure to the pregnant women (as measured in their urine) and lowered IQ in their offspring at age four and again at six to twelve years of age. Subsequently, in 2018, a study reported that the lowering of IQ in the same cohort also occurred in an earlier age range (one to three years).²¹

In 2018, using the same Mexico City cohort, Dr. Bashash found that there was a strong association between some of the symptoms of ADHD in the children and urine fluoride levels in the pregnant women.²² A 2015 study found a relationship between the prevalence of ADHD in the U.S. and fluoridation status by state; the higher the percentage of the state fluoridated, the greater the prevalence of ADHD.²³

It is hard to overstate the importance of the 2017 Bashash study.²⁰ Strikingly, it was funded by U.S. government agencies, two of which (National Institutes of Health and the Environmental Protection Agency) have promoted (NIH) and defended (EPA) the safety of water fluoridation. The study was part of a twenty-five-year ELEMENT research project (Early Life Exposures in Mexico to Environmental Toxicants) directed by professor Howard Hu from the University of Toronto. The Bashash study took over twelve years and involved researchers from many distinguished universities and institutions in Canada, the U.S. and Mexico. These included the universities of Toronto, McGill, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Harvard, as well as Mount Sinai and the National Institute of Perinatology in Mexico. These researchers have published over fifty studies conducted along similar lines for other neurotoxicants. Of particular importance was the fact that, unlike most of the other IQ studies on fluoride, this study involved measurements at the individual (not community) level for both mother and child. Based upon their extensive experience, the authors controlled for a large number of potential confounding variables, and even after controlling for these they still found a very strong relationship between fluoride exposure during pregnancy in the mother and lowered IQ in their offspring.

Fluoridation promoters, including the American Dental Association, have claimed that this study was not relevant to fluoridated communities in the U.S. because Mexico City does not have artificial fluoridation and pregnant women there are likely to have higher doses of fluoride from fluoridated salt and some naturally fluoridated water areas. Such arguments are not convincing because the biometric of exposure used was fluoride levels in the urine, which is a measure of total dose of fluoride and is independent of the source. Moreover, the range of exposure in Mexico City was within the range of fluoride levels in the urine of adults in the U.S. This point was further confirmed by a subsequent national study of the urine fluoride levels in pregnant women in Canada. This study found that levels of fluoride in the urine of Canadian women living in fluoridated communities were almost identical to the levels in Mexico City, namely 0.87 ppm in Canada versus 0.91 ppm in Mexico City.²⁴

As far as the politics of fluoridation are concerned, it is significant that some of the world’s leading neurotoxicologists, like Phillipe Grandjean (mercury specialist) and David Bellinger (lead specialist), are now participating in this research as well as reviewing the literature.^25,26 They now see fluoride’s neurotoxicity in the same vein as that of lead, arsenic, mercury and other well-established neurotoxicants.

It should also be stressed that in addition to the fifty-three IQ studies discussed above, there are many other animal, human, biochemical and cellular studies that provide an overwhelming weight of evidence that fluoride is neurotoxic. These include one hundred thirty human brain studies;²⁷ two hundred forty-one animal brain studies;²⁸ thirty-three cellular brain studies;²⁹ and thirty review studies.³⁰

FLUORIDE AND HYPOTHYROIDISM

In the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s, doctors in Argentina, France and Germany used sodium fluoride to lower the activity of the thyroid gland for those suffering from hyperthyroidism (overactive thyroid gland).^{31 -37} Despite this knowledge, government agencies in the U.S. and other fluoridating countries have never seen fit to investigate a possible relationship between fluoride exposure and the rising level of hypothyroidism in their countries. Only recently have scientists reviewed the matter.^38-41

A 2018 study, reported that while they could find no relationship between fluoride exposure and TSH levels (thyroid stimulating hormone and an indicator of hypothyroidism) and fluoridation status among the general population, they did find that for those who had low or even borderline iodine intake, fluoride exposure was associated with an increase in their TSH levels.⁴² 

The importance of this finding is that it gives a very plausible mechanism for why fluoride might lower IQ in children born to mothers with high fluoride exposure. When the fetus comes into existence it has no thyroid gland. It is entirely dependent on the mother’s thyroid levels for its early mental development. So any depression in the mother’s thyroid hormone levels will increase the risk of lowered IQ in their offspring (see Vyvyan Howard’s explanation of this situation in a PowerPoint presentation he gave in New Zealand in 2018).⁴³

WARNING PREGNANT WOMEN

One of the sad consequences of the medical community’s acceptance of the safety-and-effectiveness argument for water fluoridation, based upon dogma rather than upon the latest science, is that many doctors are oblivious of these findings. The result is that women are not being warned to avoid fluoride exposure during pregnancy. They are not being warned by their doctors, by health departments, by professional bodies or by the media. It has been left to non-governmental bodies like FAN to get the word out the best we can via social media, the Internet (see the Moms 2B Campaign),⁴⁴ press releases,⁴⁵ leaflets and talks. We have been trying to do so since 2017, but it is an extremely difficult task, as is the continuing battle to try to end the well-entrenched practice of water fluoridation.

LAWSUIT PROVIDES NEW HOPE

In November 2016, the Fluoride Action Network, along with Food & Water Watch, the American Academy of Environmental Medicine, the International Academy of Oral Medicine and Toxicology, Moms Against Fluoridation, the Organic Consumers Association and individuals, petitioned the EPA⁴⁶ to ban the deliberate addition of fluoride to public drinking water under provisions in the Toxic Substances and Control Act.

We argued that “[t]he risk to the brain posed by fluoridation additives is an unreasonable risk because, inter alia, it is now understood that fluoride’s predominant effect on tooth decay comes from topical contact with teeth, not ingestion. Since there is little benefit in swallowing fluoride, there is little justification in exposing the public to any risk of fluoride neurotoxicity, particularly via a source as essential to human sustenance as the public drinking water and the many processed foods and beverages made therefrom. The addition of fluoridation chemicals to water thus represents the very type of unreasonable risk that EPA is duly authorized to prohibit pursuant to its powers and responsibilities under Section 6 of TSCA, and Petitioners urge the Agency to exercise its authority to do so.”

In September 2017⁴⁷ the EPA rejected our petition on its scientific merits. In response to an appeal from FAN, a federal court denied EPA’s motion to dismiss in December 2017.⁴⁸

Also in December 2017⁴⁹ the EPA argued that no other studies should be added to the case after our petition was first delivered to them in November 2016. The court disagreed with EPA⁵⁰ and ruled to allow new studies, such as those by Bashash and others discussed above. A trial date has been set to take place in federal district court in San Francisco in August 2019.

We are confident that we can win this case. In order to do so, it will require us to demonstrate three things: 1) that fluoride poses a hazard to the developing brain; 2) that there is a risk at current exposure levels (from all sources combined) in fluoridated communities; 3) that this is an unreasonable risk because there are other ways that tooth decay can be prevented.

Moreover, even if fluoride is one of those alternatives, there are other and more appropriate ways of delivering fluoride to the surface of teeth than putting fluoride into the drinking water. Indeed, the majority of countries worldwide that do not fluoridate their water have actually demonstrated this over many years.

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

There are many ethical and scientific arguments against the seventy-year practice of water fluoridation. The evidence that swallowing fluoride reduces tooth decay remains weak. Not a single randomized controlled trial has been attempted to demonstrate this, and promoters have relied on studies with far weaker methodologies.⁶⁵ Meanwhile, the number of studies that indicate harm can be caused, even at the doses experienced in fluoridated communities, has been growing, particularly studies on the brain.^{20,22,24,42,46} 

With such risks on the table, it is unconscionable, in our view, that governments continue to promote the deliberate addition of a known neurotoxic and endocrine-disrupting substance to the drinking water of millions of people, most of whom have not been informed of the risks involved, or been given the opportunity to give—or refuse—their consent on the matter.

---

SIDEBARS

ELEVEN ARGUMENTS WHY FLUORIDATION SHOULD BE ENDED
1. Fluoridation is unethical. Using the public water supply to deliver dental therapy goes against all recognized principles of modern pharmacology and ethical healthcare practice. It imposes medication on all water consumers indiscriminately and without the individual’s informed consent. These include the unborn, bottle-fed infants, persons with chronic diseases known to be aggravated by fluoride (such as poor kidney function), the poorly nourished (such as those with low iodine intake) and the elderly. It does so with uncontrolled dosage, no monitoring of adverse effects and no possibility of avoiding treatment for most, if not all, people. This is especially true for those on a low-income budget who simply cannot afford avoidance measures like reverse osmosis filtration systems.
2. Fluoridation is unusual. The vast majority of countries worldwide do not fluoridate their drinking water. Out of one hundred ninety-six countries, only twenty-four have any fluoridated cities, and of those, only ten, including the U.S., fluoridate more than half their population. Ninety-five percent of the world’s people drink water without artificial fluoridation. Over half of those who do, live in the U.S. In Europe, where forty-three out of forty-eight nations have no water fluoridation, 98 percent of the population is not forced to drink fluoridated water. A few European countries (namely France, Germany, Switzerland and Austria) have fluoridated salt available, but people are not forced to buy this salt, as non-fluoridated salt is also available. Despite this, World Health Organization (WHO) data61 indicate that since the 1960s, tooth decay in twelve-year-olds has been coming down as fast in non-fluoridated countries as in fluoridated ones.
3. Children in fluoridated communities are being grossly over-exposed to fluoride. In the U.S. and other fluoridated countries, there has been a dramatic increase in young children and teens in the prevalence of dental fluorosis (discoloration of tooth enamel caused by low-level systemic fluoride toxicity during tooth formation). This condition indicates that children have been grossly over-exposed to fluoride before their permanent teeth have erupted. The latest national survey indicates that over 60 percent of U.S. teens have dental fluorosis.^52,53 Of those, 24 percent have moderate and nearly 2 percent have severe levels of the disease. These levels can produce yellow and brown staining and structural damage to the enamel. To put this into context, the early promoters of fluoridation anticipated only 10 percent of the children in fluoridated communities would be affected by this condition, and these would be only in the “very mild” category. They believed that this was an acceptable trade-off for reducing tooth decay. Even avid promoters of fluoridation no longer accept that the current prevalence rates as acceptable but they tend to blame other sources of fluoride—rather than water fluoridation—for the dramatic increase. In reality, every source of fluoride ingested contributes to this prevalence. The contribution from water fluoridation can be eliminated with a simple policy change.
4. Fluoride has the potential to damage many other tissues. Because of the prevalence of dental fluorosis, there is no question that fluoride can damage the developing teeth. Nor is there any question from the evidence provided in countries with large areas of endemic fluorosis (such as India and China) where millions of people have both dental and skeletal fluorosis, that high doses of fluoride can damage other tissues including bones, connective tissue, the brain, the endocrine system, the gut and kidneys. The Indian Ministry of Health & Family Welfare,⁵⁴ provides an excellent description of the problems faced by thousands of villages poisoned by fluoride. For the Western world, much of this evidence was provided in a comprehensive review of the literature conducted by the National Research Council of the National Academies in 2006.¹⁶ What has emerged since 2006 is a growing body of evidence that this harm can occur at doses experienced in artificially fluoridated  communities.
5. Fluoridation is unnecessary. Fluoride is not an essential nutrient. No one has ever demonstrated that a single biological process in the human body needs fluoride to function properly. There is no such thing as a “fluoridedeficiency” disease. Children can have perfectly good teeth without ingesting fluoride. Even promoters of water fluoridation admit that the predominant benefit of fluoride is topical, not systemic.^55-58 Thus, it is morally indefensible to force people to ingest fluoride via the public water supply, when for those who want fluoride,  fluoridated toothpaste is universally available. Moreover, the fluoride used in toothpaste is pharmaceutical grade whereas the fluoride used to fluoridate water is an industrial grade hazardous waste product from the phosphate fertilizer industry.²⁵
6. Today’s fluoride is worse. The fluoridating chemical used in over 90 percent of the fluoridating communities in the U.S. is a substance called hexafluorosilicic acid (H2SiF6). This substance is removed from the scrubbing systems of the phosphate fertilizer industry as a 23-25 percent solution. It is contaminated with trace amounts of other toxic substances including aluminum, arsenic, lead and radioactive isotopes (the same ore that is mined for fluoride in Florida is also mined for uranium). Ironically, this waste product cannot be dumped into the sea by international law, but health authorities blandly allow it to be put untreated into the public water supply!
7. Fluoride is very toxic and nature has developed protection mechanisms for many living things. For lower creatures like bacteria and fungi, there are genes—switched on by high levels of fluoride—which code for proteins called fluoride exporting proteins (FEX proteins). These proteins are located in the cellular membranes and pump fluoride out of the cell.²⁶ In mammals, the kidney excretes about 50 percent of fluoride ingested each day from healthy individuals, and most of the rest is rapidly sequestered in hard tissues like the bones. Importantly, the human breast appears to act as a fluoride filter for the new born baby. The level in mothers’ milk is remarkably low (0.004 ppm).²⁷ Thus, a bottle-fed baby, when the formula is made up with fluoridated tap water (0.7 to 1.2 ppm), will get approximately two hundred times more fluoride than a breastfed infant (that is, two hundred times more than nature intended).
8. Fluoridation is unscientific. Fluoridation is promoted with PR techniques like endorsements, not with sound
science. Most of the endorsements were made shortly after the U.S. Public Health Service endorsed water fluoridation in 1950 with virtually no science on the short-term—let alone long-term—health effects. Citizens should be very wary of taking such endorsements at face value unless they are accompanied by an up-to-date review of the literature—and very few are. Incredibly, in over seventy years there has been no randomized control trial (RCT) to demonstrate that swallowing fluoride lowers tooth decay. As far as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is concerned, an RCT is the gold standard for approving new drugs. According to the FDA, fluoride is an unapproved drug²⁸ and the FDA has never approved fluoride tablets for ingestion. Many decision makers and journalists around the world are impressed when they read the notorious statement from the CDC in 1999 that “Fluoridation is one of the top public health achievements of the 20th century.”⁶³ However, what they may not realize is that this statement did not come from the CDC itself (which has about thirty thousand employees, many of whom are highly qualified in many medical fields as well as toxicology) but from the CDC’s small Oral Health Division with only thirty employees, most of whom only have dental qualifications. Moreover, their job is defined as promoting fluoridation. They even admit to not following—or being responsible for—the science pertaining to fluoride’s harmful effects. Journalists and others have been impressed by a public relations exercise by a promotional body, not by a body that maintains a careful overview of any harm the practice may be causing.
9. Health risks are ignored in fluoridated countries. Sadly, because the imposed dental practice of water fluoridation is so entrenched in the psyche of the medical, dental and public health establishments in fluoridated countries, neither governments nor the mainstream media are warning the public about the large and growing
body of scientific research30 that shows that fluoride exposure poses many health risks.
10. Fluoridation violates the precautionary principle. The scientific evidence that swallowing fluoride lowers tooth decay is weak,³¹ but the weight of evidence that it causes harm to the developing brain is so one-sided, that to wait for further studies before halting the deliberate addition of fluoride to water is a rash and irresponsible public health position.
11. Fluoridation violates the principles of environmental justice. The addition of fluoride to public water is an environmental injustice to people living in poverty in fluoridated areas who do not have access to alternative water
sources and are captive to tap water for all their water needs. Moreover, it is well established that those with poor
nutrition are more vulnerable to fluoride’s toxic effects, and poor nutrition is more likely to occur among those
with low incomes.

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33. Goldemberg L. 1932. Comment Agiraient-ils Therapeutiquement les Fluoers dans le Goitre Exopthalmique et dans L’Hyperthryoidisme. La Semana Médica 39:1659.
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37. Galletti and Joyet. 1958. Effect of fluorine on thyroidal iodine metabolism in hyperthyroidism. The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism. Oct;18(10):1102-10. http://fluoridealert.org/wp-content/uploads/galletti-1958.pdf
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42. Malin et al. 2018. Fluoride exposure and thyroid function among adults living in Canada: Effect modification by iodine status. Environment International. 121:667-674. http://fluoridealert.org/wp-content/uploads/malin-2018.pdf.
43. Vyvyan Howard, FRCPath, http://fluoridealert.org/howard-2018-nz/.
44. Moms2B Campaign, http://fluoridealert.org/issues/moms2b/.
45. Fluoride Action Network , Press Releases, http://fluoridealert.org/news/?country=united-states&sub=fluoride-action-network-press-release-unitedstates.
46. Connett M. 2016. Petition to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under Section 21 of the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), 15 U.S.C. § 2620, invoking Section 6 of TSCA, 15 U.S.C. § 2605(a), on behalf of several groups and individuals. November 22. http://fluoridealert.org/wp-content/uploads/epa-petition.pdf.
47. U.S. EPA (Environmental Protection Agency). 2017. Federal defendants’ motion to dismiss. In the United States District Court for Northern California, San Francisco Division. Case 3:17-cv-02162-EMC, Document 28. September 25. http://fluoridealert.org/wp-content/uploads/tsca.epa-motion-to-dismiss.9-25-17.pdf.
48. United States District Court for Northern California. 2017. Order denying defendant’s motion to dismiss. Case No. 17-cv-02162-EMC, Docket No.28. December 21. http://fluoridealert.org/wp-content/uploads/tsca.12-21-17.denies-epa-motion-to-dismiss.pdf.
49. U.S. EPA (Environmental Protection Agency). 2017. Federal defendants’ notice of motion and motion to limit review to the administrative record and to strike plaintiffs’ jury demand. Case No.: 17-cv-02162-EMC. December 14. http://fluoridealert.org/wp-content/uploads/tsca.12-14-17.epa-requests-protective-order-to-limit-discovery.
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50. United States District Court for Northern California. 2018. Order Denying Defendant’s Motion to Limit Review to the Administrative Record. Case 3:17-cv-02162-EMC, Document 53, February 7. http://fluoridealert.org/wp-content/uploads/tsca.2-7-18.court-denies-epa-motion-to-limit.pdf.
51. WHO Data, http://fluoridealert.org/issues/caries/who-data/.
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56. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention. 2001. Recommendations for using fluoride to prevent and control dental caries in the United States. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Review. Recommendations and Reports, August 17, 2001 / 50(RR14);1-42.
57. Ibid at 16.
58. Featherstone JD. 2000. The science and practice of caries prevention. Journal of the American Dental Association. July: 131(7):887-99.
59. Fluoride Action Network, Phosphate Fertilizer Industry, see http://fluoridealert.org/articles/phosphate01/
60. Li et al. 2013. Eukaryotic resistance to fluoride toxicity mediated by a widespread family of fluoride export proteins. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. Nov 19;110(47):19018-23.
61. Ibid at 16, page 40, https://www.nap.edu/read/11571/chapter/4#40.
62. Moore, Robert J. 2005. Fluoride is an unapproved drug. Letter from Food and Drug Administration to Daniel Stockin. www.fluoridealert.org/wp-content/uploads/fda-2005a.pdf.
63. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention. 1999. Ten Great Public Health Achievements–United States, 1900-1999. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Review. December 24, 1999 / 48(50);1141
64. Fluoride Action Network. Study fluoridealert.org/studytracker/.
65. Iheozor-Ejiofor Z, et al. 2015. Water fluoridation for the prevention of dental caries. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. June 18. https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD010856.pub2/abstract.

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