The question of, ‘ is fluoride in drinking water bad for you?’ may seem like a rhetorical one.
After all everyone knows that water fluoridation aids dental health, which is why it is added to water and has been for over half a century. The idea of fluoride not being good for you may seem absurd.
Why?
If history should have taught us anything it should be that traditional views are not always correct; the world being flat, slavery, smoking cigarettes etc… However, it seems that we never seem to learn from our predecessors.
This article questions the safety and efficacy of drinking fluoridated water to determine whether water fluoride in drinking water is bad for you.
History of Fluoride
Fluorine, which is what Fluoride derives from, is a member of a group of elements called halogens and is the thirteenth most common element in the earth’s crust.
Elemental fluorine is a pale yellow gas and a toxic poison.
The most reactive of all the halogens, fluorine will bind with almost any other element to form a fluoride.
Elemental fluorine does not occur in nature as it is found only in compounds with other elements.
It has a particularly strong affinity for calcium with which it forms a strong bond, and In its natural state fluorine is commonly found as calcium fluoride.
Controversially, fluoride is used as a basic ingredient in both the antidepressant PROZAC (Fluoxetene Hydrochloride) and Sarin nerve gas (Isopropyl-Methyl-Phosphoryl Fluoride).
Sodium fluoride is also a common ingredient in rat and cockroach poisons, anaesthetics, sedative hypnotics, psychiatric drugs, and military nerve gas; it is a hazardous-waste by-product from the manufacture of aluminium.
Industrial fluorine was a major pollutant of rivers and streams, poisoning fish and plantation.
The idea of adding fluoride to the water supplies was first introduced by the aluminium cartel, ALCOA in 1944 when they employed a man named Oscar Ewing who later went on to become head of the U.S. Government’s Federal Security Agency who began a campaign to add sodium fluoride to public drinking water.
Today, ALCOA sell fluoride for use in drinking water and toothpaste.
Fluoride went from being an expensive burden to the company to being sold at a 20,000% markup.
Fluoride goes into water at approximately one milligram per litre or one part per million (1 ppm). However, only half of one percent of the water supply is actually drunk the rest goes literally down the drain as free hazardous-waste disposal for the chemical industry.
Why Is Fluoride Put in Drinking Water?
Water fluoridation is allegedly a safe, efficient, and well-proven way of reducing tooth decay.
Studies in Britain, America, Australia and New Zealand have demonstrated that fluoridation reduces the overall prevalence and severity of cavities.
Water fluoridation is claimed to have played an important role in reducing inequalities in dental health throughout various parts of the world, especially in countries without free dental health care.
The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention spoke of water fluoridation as “being one of the 10 major public health achievements of the 20th century and promoting it is a healthy people objective of 2010.”
Why Then is Fluoridated Water Considered Bad For Your Health?
The journal of the International Society for Fluoride Research consists of studies from Auckland, New Zealand and the United States that concludes fluoride is the cause of an incurable disease called fluorosis.
Fluoridationists would not accept that fluoridated water contributed to the unsightly mottling (fluorosis); until some countries including New Zealand, recommended lowering the level of fluoride in the water to less than 1 ppm. They still insist that the benefit to teeth outweighs any harm.
Inevitably what tends to affect the teeth tends to affect the bones.
Once ingested only 50% of the fluoride is excreted and the other half remains in the body which can accumulate in bones and weaken them.
In 1990 the first study reporting an association between fluoridated water and hip fractures in the elderly was published.
2 Polish researchers, using a new computerized method of X-ray diagnosis, reported that boys with dental fluorosis also exhibit bone structure disturbances.
Several other studies have now reported this association between water fluoride levels and hip fractures.
There is also confirmatory evidence from France that hip fracture rates among the elderly–a very costly medical care problem are significantly higher where water fluoride levels are elevated than when they are not.
Osteosarcoma is a rare form of bone cancer that animal experiments have claimed that fluoride is the cause. (Fluorides and Human Health. Geneva: World Health Organization, 1970)
However such studies are often easy to criticize as they are studies carried out on animals and may not be relevant to human beings, however there has been an increase in this rare bone cancer in areas of America that are fluoridated but not in the nonfluoridated areas.
The New Jersey Department of Health reported osteosarcoma rates were three to seven times higher in its fluoridated areas than in its nonfluoridated areas.
Even more chilling is the evidence from China that children with dental fluorosis have on average lower intelligence scores.
The intelligence was measured of 907 children aged between 8 to 13 years, living in areas that differed in the amount of fluoride present in the environment. The Intelligence Quotient (IQ) of children living in areas with a medium or severe prevalence of fluorosis was lower than that of children living in areas with only slight fluorosis or no fluorosis. The development of intelligence appeared to be adversely affected by fluoride in the areas with a medium or severe prevalence of fluorosis.
A high fluoride intake was associated with a lower Intelligence.
The effect of exposure to a high level of fluoride on intelligence may occur at an early stage of development of the embryo and infant when the differentiation of brain nerve cells is occurring and development is most rapid.
This finding is supported by a recently published animal experiment in America, which showed that fluoride also accumulated in certain areas of the brain, affecting behaviour and the ability to learn.
Although previous short-term kinetic studies found that the blood-brain barrier was ‘relatively impermeable to fluoride’.
New findings now contradicted this; adult females were exposed for six weeks to 100 ppm fluoride, toothpaste is ten times stronger than this, and everyone as a child has swallowed toothpaste.
The fluoride accumulated in an area in the brain called the hippocampal and affected the ladies behavior. Hippocampal damage is linked to hyperactivity and cognitive deficits; it is thought to acted as a central processor that interprets our memory and our perspective of environmental surroundings. This is why behavioral decisions and dilemmas are altered.
Fluoride Is also well-known by biochemists to be an inhibitor of enzymes.
Fluoride forms a strong hydrogen bond with the amide group, and thus has the potential to interfere with fundamental life-processes involving the shape and function of both proteins and nucleic acids.
If 1 ppm was considered to be optimum for drinking water in 1945, it cannot be considered optimum today, because there are far more sources of fluoride available and unavoidable (processed food, fruit juices, toothpaste etc). To claim that 1 ppm is optimum today is to underline the unscientific nature of the pro-fluoride lobby.
Even if fluoride is proven to be beneficial to teeth, there are alternative ways of delivering it to our children, without forcing it onto to everyone else.
The argument that we should fluoridate in order to benefit the poor could be particularly inappropriate, because it is the poor who are usually more likely to suffer from some of these deficiencies, as well as being more exposed to other toxic substances.
Is Fluoridation Band In Certain Countries?
Denmark banned fluoridation when its National Agency for Environmental Protection, after consulting the widest possible range of scientific sources, pointed out that the long-term effects of low fluoride intakes on certain groups in the population for example, people who are diabetic, have kidney problems, and those who have vitamin, calcium and magnesium deficiencies reduced kidney function, were insufficiently known.
Sweden also rejected fluoridation on the recommendation of a special Fluoride Commission, which included among its reasons, that “The combined and long-term environmental effects of fluoride are insufficiently known”
Holland banned fluoridation after a group of medical practitioners presented evidence that it caused reversible neuromuscular and gastrointestinal harm to some individuals in the population.
Only America where it originated, and countries under strong American influence persist in the practice and they have been for many years.
Throughout the history of science, whenever new disconcerting evidence confronts traditional theory, professionals seem to bend over backwards to defend their pet theory. ‘Who’ says water fluoridation is good for you?
From the beginning, distinguished and reputable scientists have opposed fluoridation, in spite of considerable intimidation and pressure from others in their field.
The main people promoting water fluoridation are dentists; all claims that go against fluoridation have to do with toxicity after its ingested but what do dentists really know about toxicity?
There are reports of aluminium in the brain possibly being a causative factor in Alzheimers Disease, and evidence points towards fluorides strong affinity for aluminium and its ability to trick the blood-brain barrier by looking like the hydrogen ion, and thus allowing chemical access to brain tissue.
Former principal dental officer of Auckland, New Zealand, Dr. John Colquhoun, discovered this new evidence on fluoride over 25 years ago and changed from being a vigorous proponent of fluoridation to a conscientious opponent of it.
A review on independent scientific evidence over the past 50 years reveals that fluoride actually harms teeth (fluorosis) and allegedly shortens our life span, promotes cancer and various mental disturbances, accelerates osteoporosis and broken hips in old people, and makes us stupid, docile, and subservient.
The question of ‘ is fluoride is drinking water bad for you?’ now seems very valid with overwhelming evidence that it clearly does more harm than good.
You can find out more about the dangers of fluoride and 100 more toxic ingredients by clicking here now.
