Do you know what they’re putting in your water?
Well, yes. It’s not exactly hidden. It’s fluoride, and it’s there to help your teeth. Or to render you docile and sterile and calcify your pineal gland so that you can never see the REAL world with your third eye. Take your pick.
The history of fluoridation began with an investigation into “Colorado Brown Stain” by Dr. Frederick McKay. It was a tooth disease common in Colorado Springs in the early 1900s. The disease was unique to that area and developed in children; if children developed it, they’d carry the stains for life, but adults without stains did not develop new ones.
During the efforts to determine the cause of what would be termed “mottled enamel”, the properties of the enamel were examined. Interestingly, teeth that exhibited the syndrome were highly resistant to decay. Various theories were floated, including a tainted water supply. No solid evidence could be provided that pointed toward a specific cause, however. The research continued, though. Then, from The National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research:
The water-causation theory got a gigantic boost in 1923. That year, McKay trekked across the Rocky Mountains to Oakley, Idaho to meet with parents who had noticed peculiar brown stains on their children’s teeth. The parents told McKay that the stains began appearing shortly after Oakley constructed a communal water pipeline to a warm spring five miles away. McKay analyzed the water, but found nothing suspicious in it. Nonetheless, he advised town leaders to abandon the pipeline altogether and use another nearby spring as a water source.
McKay’s advice did the trick. Within a few years, the younger children of Oakley were sprouting healthy secondary teeth without any mottling.
The researchers were able to establish a link to water. They still didn’t know what was in the water that was causing the problem, though.
At that point, ALCOA took notice. The aluminum producer had plant runoff into all of the water sources that were associated with brown stain. Already reeling from negative publicity about their new non-stick pans, they conducted testing on the water and found nothing there..
…at least, until a junior researcher noticed a chemical they hadn’t even considered might be there, something that hadn’t been tested for. Fluoride. Which was one of the effluents from nearby ALCOA plants.
Facing a huge backlash, ALCOA was happy to provide their data with the dental investigators when it became clear the dentists were more concerned about the cosmetic and strengthening effects than getting financial recompense for the afflicted.
With that data, experiments were performed to determine the levels at which discoloration occurred, and a level somewhat below that was chosen for testing. Multi-year tests demonstrated that adding fluoride can significantly strengthen teeth without any ill effects. The success of the tests encouraged communities to sign on to the new fluoridation concept.
And that’s how we got here, except….
There are serious questions about the usefulness of fluoride on adult permanent teeth, such as these from Newsweek:
The Cochrane Collaboration, a group of doctors and researchers known for their comprehensive reviews—which are widely regarded as the gold standard of scientific rigor in assessing effectiveness of public health policies—recently set out to find out if fluoridation reduces cavities. They reviewed every study done on fluoridation that they could find, and then winnowed down the collection to only the most comprehensive, well-designed and reliable papers. Then they analyzed these studies’ results, and published their conclusion in a review earlier this month.
The review identified only three studies since 1975—of sufficient quality to be included—that addressed the effectiveness of fluoridation on tooth decay in the population at large. These papers determined that fluoridation does not reduce cavities to a statistically significant degree in permanent teeth, says study co-author Anne-Marie Glenny, a health science researcher at Manchester University in the United Kingdom. The authors found only seven other studies worthy of inclusion dating prior to 1975.
The honest questions and debate about fluoride’s usefulness have given support to those who rely on hearsay instead of the scientific method. Rumors abound – rumors that are spoken as fact. Fluoride was used by the Nazis to quell the Jewish prisoners. It was used by the Soviets to control their prisoners. It calcifies the third eye. It causes brain damage.
Of all of these, the only one that might have some merit is the argument that it causes brain damage. That contention stems from a series of tests performed where a direct correlation was generated between brain damage and fluoride usage… but that study used massive doses far beyond that which would be encountered by a person drinking water (or even drinking fluoride rinse) every day.
There is no evidence that fluoride makes a person docile or diminishes their intellect or libido. Whether it’s useful or not is up to debate, but it is certainly not dangerous as provided.
Note: the initial release misspelled “fluoride” consistently, reversing the “u” and “o”, because the author is too cocky about his backgrounds in hard science and English to bother checking anything. Many thanks to Concerned Citizen for the catch.
