Seven Stories Press
New York
2004
a contribution by Art Goodtimes
Fluoride isn’t safe? But we put it in our water. We give it to our children to protect their teeth. And the government tells us we should, right?
Well, guess what? It looks like you, like so many others, have been sold a bill of goods, both by our government and their corporate overseers.
Checking Alternet’s Ten Worst Corporations of 2004, one begins to accept the fact that some corporations lie to their consumers, lie to their customers, lie to their workers. And that sometimes government regulators (thanks to the revolving doors between industry and federal agencies) conspire to allow well-connected industries, crucial to modern industrial society, to hide the scientific facts.
That is exactly the case Bryson makes in his well-documented treatise (112 pages of notes and citations – more than a third of the book). American industry lied to us. Government regulators lied to us. Scientists lied to us. And for the last 60 years we’ve been operating on the flimsiest of contested facts, adding a seriously toxic substance to our water supplies (voluntarily!) and have suffered the consequences.
Fluoride accumulates in the body, concentrates in the arteries, attracting calcium, and contributes directly to their hardening. We get fluoride in processed food, bottled water, and in the very air we breathe – with coal-fired power plants being one of the largest producers of organofluorines.
And hardening of the arteries and heart attacks are only one side effect. In 1992 it was Dr. Joseph Lyon of the University of Utah who co-authored a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association “which found that water fluoridation was associated with an increased risk of hip fracture.” Ever since, he’s had trouble getting funding for his continued research. And yet, interestingly, the U.S. has one of the highest rates of hip fractures in the world, and is witnessing an epidemic of arthritis in 21 million Americans.
Bryson details these and dozens of other harmful side effects for a substance we’ve been led to believe was good for us.
Read how fluoride was a critical element, like uranium, in the production of the first atom bomb, and how its production exposed thousands of war-time industrial workers to poisoning and death. Read how fluoride is an essential ingredient of CFCs and PFCs.
Read of the despicable work of Dr. Robert A. Kehoe of the Kettering Institute and Dr. Harold C. Hodge of the Forsyth Dental Center in their purposely failing to reveal studies showing widespread toxic damage from fluorides, so as to keep worker lawsuits from cutting into corporate profits for the big fluoride-polluting industries like Alcoa, Reynolds Aluminum, Dupont, Monsanto and literally hundreds of others.
Read about the use of non-informed human experiments in studies regarding fluoride toxicity, particularly African-Americans.
Read of the real cause of the Donora (Pennsylvania) air pollution tragedy in October of 1948 – where 20 folks were killed and hundreds injured by a smog of industrial pollutants from the nearby U.S. Steel plant. Read how the early Newburgh and Grand Rapids fluoride studies were manipulated to achieve industry’s desired results by less than honest researchers. Read how even those experiments used “pure sodium fluoride while 90% of the fluoridated public water supplies in the United State use not pharmaceutical-grade fluoride but industrial-grade silicofluoride ‘scrubbed’ from the smokestacks of the Florida phosphate industry”.
Bryson’s is a damning tale.
It was the 1956 “Final Newburgh Report” that found that young women in Newburgh reached puberty at an earlier age than did girls in neighboring non-fluoridated Kingston, suggesting the kind of endocrine disruption seen in other toxic chemicals. And it was five years after fluoridation in Grand Rapids that heart disease doubled, while Newburgh had reportedly the highest heart disease rate in the nation.
While researchers may be divided on fluoride (as the industry keeps saying about global warming), listen to Nobel Prize winning pharmacologist Dr. Arvid Carlsson in an afterword to this book when he says unequivocally, “The addition of fluoride to water supplies violates modern pharmacological principles,” and he continues, “In addition, this measure is ethically questionable.” Or consider what dental researcher Dr. Hardy Limeback of the University of Toronto has to say when he surmises that, given the dangers of fluorosis, fluoride toothpaste should be a prescription drug.
Reading The Fluoride Deception is a complete education in why some segments of our population don’t trust the government, are skeptical even of government scientists, and have conspiracies theories for almost everything.
After reading this book, my family has thrown out all toothpaste with fluoride added. And we’ve made certain that we drink water that isn’t fluorinated. As Thomas Pynchon demonstrated so capably in Z, a good dose of paranoia is probably not only justified in modern American society but necessary for our health and well-being.
Posted by craig at April 9, 2005 05:50 PM