I have been sitting with this article for the entire month. I don’t even know where to begin…
Here we go. Before about 1945, Fluoride was considered so toxic that it was on the governments’ most toxic list, right between arsenic and lead. You couldn’t buy it anywhere; it was impossible to get your hands on for any price. Then in the 40’s our government decided that it needed to make the atomic bomb; massive quantities of fluorine were necessary to separate and concentrate the uranium isotopes. All of the sudden, we had close to 1 million tons of fluorine with no place or use for it….They then began doing research looking into other possible uses for this substance. They found many.
After World War II, huge quantities of fluorine have been used to produce organofluorine compounds (compounds where fluorine is attached to carbon). These include chlorinated fluorocarbons (CFCs); Teflon® (polytetrafluoroethylene), an extremely stable plastic resistant to the vast majority of chemicals including fluorine gas; and many pharmaceuticals, pesticides and insecticides. Sodium fluoride is used as a rodenticide and insecticide (mainly for roaches and ants), as a disinfectant for fermentation apparatus in breweries and distilleries, in wood preservation, and in rimmed steel manufacture. It is also the form of fluoride that they put in our water.
Now you may say “but my dentist says that it is safe and that it protects my teeth, why should I believe you?” Well, you can believe whomever you want, I just want everyone to start questioning the whole water fluoridation issue and stop accepting it as a good thing based on basically nothing. There is really no evidence to support fluoridation of our water and the studies they do have are short runs with faulty information that has been misinterpreted. I am not saying that your dentist is trying to hurt you, they have all been fed the same faulty information, and it just keeps getting passed down the line like bad DNA.
We all make choices every day regarding our health and we like to feel that we have some amount of control over what we put into our bodies and the bodies of our children. So what choice do we have with fluoride if it is in the water supply? Yeah, we can buy a reverse osmosis filter or buy bottled water, but that has a heavy impact on the environment and that is not even the worst part. Think about everything you eat and drink in a day, how much of it contains water? Let’s see, there is juice/lemonade, soup/stocks. Jams/jellies, sports drinks, tea/coffee, lunch meats, rice and soy milks, soft drinks, anything processed…they all contain water and if the product is cooked, like a soup or broth, then the fluoride in the water used gets concentrated because it does not evaporate. So it is not just an issue with tap water, fluoride is in everything because it is in our water supply! You cannot get away from it. It is even in our fruits and vegetables because they are watered with fluoridated water. And don’t think that organic products are safer; they only use a carbon filter for the water leaving all of the fluoride intact.
Did you know that the employee union at the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) has filed a grievance on behalf of the employees to protect them from the toxic effects of the fluoridated water? Here is a quote from the brief: “The implication for the general public of these calculations is clear. Recent, peer-reviewed toxicity data, when applied to EPA's standard method for controlling risks from toxic chemicals, require 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 (24).
We have also taken a direct step to protect the employees we represent from the risks of drinking fluoridated water. We applied EPA's risk control methodology, the Reference Dose, to the recent neurotoxicity data. The Reference Dose is the daily dose, expressed in milligrams of chemical per kilogram of body weight that a person can receive over the long term with reasonable assurance of safety from adverse effects. Application of this methodology to the Varner et al. (4) data leads to a Reference Dose for fluoride of 0.000007 mg/kg-day. Persons who drink about one quart of fluoridated water from the public drinking water supply of the District of Columbia while at work receive about 0.01mg/kg-day from that source alone. This amount of fluoride is more than 100 times the Reference Dose. On the basis of these results the union filed a grievance, asking that EPA provide un-fluoridated drinking water to its employees.” Interesting, don’t you think? Especially since it is recommended that we drink close to a gallon of water a day. What is worse, is that the data is based on an adult, how many times the reference dose are our small children consuming on a daily basis?
Fluoride is not the beneficial additive that is purported to be. At least in the US we have the warnings on all tubes of toothpaste that have fluoride.
Oh, you did not know that?
Well if you have a tube of toothpaste in your house check it out and you will find the warning. There is enough fluoride in a typical tube of toothpaste to kill two small children if they consumed the entire tube at once. This really isn't rocket science. If it kills you in large doses, doesn't it stand to reason that in smaller doses it probably is not a wise choice?
Maria