The Dangers of Fluoride

I was always told that I had no choice but to use that nasty fluoride rinse in school. Every so often (I forget the exact intervals), dental assistants would wheel in a cart full of little paper cups filled with this disgusting liquid—usually pink, and purported to be bubblegum flavour. I gagged nearly every time, but my parents insisted on having it done, so I never got the waiver.

I also had to have a similar experience at the dentist's office, where they would give me the choice of equally noxious false flavours (root beer, chocolate, strawberry, bile, etc.), formed as a paste and squeezed into roughly jaw-shaped foam trays that were then crammed into my mouth and left for what seemed like an eternity. I suspect it was about ten minutes.

Flash forward to my adult years, featuring full-on tooth sensitivity, often to the extent that the pain would keep me up at night. At the time, it was explained away with things like receding gums that exposed the porous surfaces normally hidden by flesh. I was prescribed the use of Sensodyne and a brush-on fluoride treatment, followed by frequent use of Oral-B Fluorinse. This seemed to stem the pain over the short term, but it was never a permanent solution. In fact, for a spell, it even got a little worse.

Flash forward yet again to the advent of YouTube and sundry conspiracy theory videos. What turned up there was this particularly interesting video about the fluoride cover up, particularly in the U.S.:

Now, to be fair I was researching fluoride for my daughter, who had developed a little cavity in her front tooth. The dentist we saw nonchalantly stated that it was quite common in our area “because there's no fluoride in the water.”

What I discovered was deeply disturbing. You see, what that film unveiled was that there's absolutely no clinical evidence whatsoever to support the use of fluoride in the prevention of tooth decay. It's an assumption from the 1950's, paid for by large industrial giants who needed a way to legally dispose of their waste products. Waste products like Sodium Fluoride.

What has turned up in the scientific record is the DANGERS associated with fluoride use. You'll notice on your tube of toothpaste that there's a warning on the back: swallowing anything more than the normal amount of their product warrants a call to the poison control centre. The “normal” amount, incidentally, isn't the swath of goop most people put on their toothbrush. It is, in fact, only a pea-sized amount.

Now, consider this for a moment. If swallowing a pea-sized amount of toothpaste warrants a call to Poison Control, what would be warranted by the daily consumption of this substance in drinking water? And this is what we're supposed to be happily feeding to ourselves and our children in order to prevent tooth decay?

One more reality check on the usage of fluoride: Not only is there no evidence of its inherent value as an additive in routine topical use, but there's even less evidence to suggest that it makes any difference at all in systemic (i.e. drinking water) use. In fact, the systemic use has proven to have far more dangerous associations with digestive problems, and even more evidence of serious mental degeneration.

Curious that its use in drinking water systems is encouraged by governments when it's well-documented that the effect on the brain reduces things like independent thinking or the ability to make decisions for oneself, but does make those affected considerably more open to direct suggestion.

More curious still is the fact that countries that have never adopted any fluoridation policy whatsoever have far lower incidents of tooth decay among children and adults. Could it be that the degenerative dental condition called “fluoridosis” might have something to do with higher decay rates in North America? Could it be that tooth decay rates are actually caused by a highly acidic, highly sugarred juvenile diet?

It's no coincidence, I think, that North America suffers an obesity problem, an epidemic of ADHD, another epidemic of juvenile diabetes, and a further epidemic of childhood tooth decay despite widespread use of fluoride as a supposed preventative. It's all about the diet, and that's where we need to take a serious look at our strategy, and our openness to suggestion, when it comes to being told what's good for us.

If you have the option, get rid of your fluoride toothpaste and stick with something less poluted. And if your local government has given you no choice but to have fluoride in your drinking water, install a filter to get rid of it. Or better yet, lobby to stop the practice, because there's no need for you to be poisoning yourself or your children for the sake of a prevention strategy that has no basis or support in the real world of scientific evaluation.