The evidence that fluoridation is harmful shouldn’t be ignored
It’s a story as old as modern industry itself. An industrial process creates huge amounts of largely worthless byproduct, so what do the manufacturers do? They find a way to add value to it and create a new product, marketing it as “essential” or “healthy” or both. A period of years or decades pass, and the product is firmly established as precisely that—“essential,” “healthy” or both. But in truth, it’s the opposite.
Of course, it’s not surprising that companies do this—the aim of companies in the capitalist system is to maximise profit, after all—but that doesn’t change the fact that, again and again, the enterprising nature of business has helped to create a public-health disaster.
This is exactly what happened around the turn of the 20th century with the worthless oil byproducts of the cotton industry. Producers had enormous quantities of cottonseed oil and nothing to do with it apart from sell it as an industrial lubricant or paint thinner. Using new hydrogenation technology, the cottonseed producers created margarine, a spreadable fat, which they marketed to the public as a “healthy” alternative to the animal fats humans have eaten since the beginning of time. Eventually, with the help of big money and gerrymandered science—the so-called “lipid-heart hypothesis”—these novel fats and oils displaced butter and lard and tallow, and seventy years later everyone is unhealthier and unhappier than it would ever have been possible to imagine. Instead of the renewed health we were promised, we were made subject to a terrible new kind of physical bondage, under the domination of big food, big pharma and big government.
The same is true of the products that are used to fluoridate water, especially fluorosilicic acid in its various different forms. It wasn’t until the middle of the twentieth century that public fluoridation campaigns, with the backing of producers of fluorosilicic acid, began, but today in the US about 75% of people receive a fluoridated water supply through their taps. The main justification for this is the prevention of dental caries.
For decades, campaigners against fluoridation have been portrayed by governments, scientists and the media as cranks—the more so, in fact, as evidence of the harmful effects of fluoride exposure has stacked up. Animal studies show, unequivocally, that high levels of fluoride exposure can cause serious neurobiological changes, especially in the offspring of pregnant animals that are exposed, because fluoride can pass the placental barrier from mother to child.
But it’s not just animals. In recent years, credible studies from Canada and Mexico have linked fluoridation to lowered IQs and cognitive impairment in children. And now a new study, from the US, shows that the standard concentration of fluoride in tap water across the US may be enough to double the risk of a child displaying neurobehavioural issues—including diagnosable conditions like ADHD—at the age of three, if it was exposed during gestation.
The indisputable truth is this: when fluoridation was introduced, we simply didn’t know what effects it would have, not really, in the same we didn’t understand the full effects of substituting novel vegetable and seed oils for the animal fats man evolved eating and to eat.
Instead we found out. But part of the problem with f***ing around and finding out is that things become complicated. Much more complicated. All of a sudden, decades later, you have enormous vested interests—commercial, scientific, governmental—whose sole purpose is to protect their profits and reputations and prevent any kind of change to the new status quo. Causality becomes diffuse, and now you’re not just talking about polyunsaturated fatty acids but other lifestyle factors like smoking, lack of exercise, exposure to harmful chemicals, stress and a thousand other things. Untangling those threads becomes very hard indeed. How convenient.
The alternative, of course, is to reject the attitude of “safe until proven otherwise.” That’s the attitude, driven by the laws of commerce and the desire to maximise profit, that allows minimal testing of new products and partisan, corporate science to be put forward, often in secrecy, behind closed doors, in support of a new product’s safety. The FDA’s system for licensing new foods and drugs has been described as “the foxes guarding the henhouse.” It’s hard to disagree.
As I’ve said elsewhere, I believe the attitude towards innovations needs to be a conservative one: harmful until proven otherwise. The evidence—not least of all the potentially species-ending reproductive effects caused by exposure to thousands of different plastic chemicals, herbicides and insecticides, fire retardants, and so on—fully justifies me in saying this.
Dazzled by the miraculous properties of plastics, we’ve created a world where in less than two decades’ time, the median man will have a sperm count of zero: one half of all men will produce no sperm, and the other half will produce so few they might as well produce none. What then? Extinction? Does man simply go gentle into that good night?
We keep making the same mistakes. Instead of adding fluoride to the water, we could have encouraged better diet. The pioneering dentist Weston A. Price showed, in the 1930s , how traditional societies that continued to eat their diets of primarily nutrient-dense animal foods barely suffered tooth decay at all, even if they didn’t brush their teeth. What mattered was the massive quantities of protein, fat and most of all fat-soluble vitamins, minerals and co-factors they consumed on a daily basis. That’s what protected their health and their dentition, not a contaminated water supply.
But getting people to eat more butter and cheese and organ meat wasn’t in line with the emerging scientific-corporate agenda that has captured our food supply and much more besides—so we got fluoridation instead.
It’s time, I think, to admit that fluoridation needs to be rethought. At the very least, urgent, honest, unpoliticised research must take place and be presented to the public, who should be allowed to decide—on the basis of the facts, without any reference to profits—whether they want their water to have fluoride in it.
Of course, this won’t happen, because it would call into question so much more than what is or isn’t in the water today.
