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In November of 2016, the Fluoride Action Network (FAN), together with it's partners Food & Water Watch, Organic Consumers Association, American Academy of Environmental Medicine, International Academy of Oral Medicine and Toxicology, Moms Against Fluoridation and several individuals, filed a petition against the Environmental Protection Agency on the grounds that a large body of research demonstrates fluoride is neurotoxic at doses within the range now seen in fluoridated communities. The EPA denied their petition in 2017.

In response, FAN and its coalition partners filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, legally challenging the EPA's denial of their petition. The results of this trial have been publicized recently, and they are surprisingly good news!

Join us on this episode of Objective:Health as we review the results of the trial and talk about the case against water fluoridation.


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Running Time: 00:30:44

Download: MP3 — 28.2 MB


Here's the transcript of the show:

Doug: Hello and welcome to Objective Health. I am your host Doug and with me in our virtual studio are Erica and Elliot.

Elliot: Hello.

Erica: Hi.

Doug: And in the background on the ones and twos, keeping it real is Damian.

Damian: Hello.

Doug: So today we are going to be talking about fluoride. We've done a number of shows on fluoride before and pointed out all the terrible things about it and why it should not be put voluntarily into the drinking water. But there's been some recent news because there's been an actual lawsuit going on. I'll just say that on Mercola right now there is an article called Fluoride on Trial - EPA Scientists Admit Fluoride Harms the Brain. Actually we've got that one up on SOTT.net. It's an article about the lawsuit that's going on right now but they actually have a video of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. interviewing the lead attorney for the Fluoride Action Network who is involved in the lawsuit against the EPA right now.

I highly recommend anybody watch that video. It's only half an hour so it's not too long and it's very interesting. But we're going to go through some of it today. It was a case where for a long time different groups have been petitioning the EPA about fluoride in the water, bringing to their attention different scientific articles, studies that have been done showing the harms, the risks, that sort of thing and have more or less been ignored. The current group that FAN (Fluoride Action network) is heading use something called section 21 of the TSCA (Toxic Substance Control Act) which actually allows citizens of non-governmental organizations to petition the EPA to remove toxic substances found to pose an unreasonable risk.

So they used that to send a petition to the EPA and this actually is currently the first one that has gone to trial which began November 22 of 2016 and the people behind it are FAN, Food and Water Watch, Organic Consumers Association, American Academy of Environmental Medicine, International Academy of Oral Medicine and Toxicology (IAOMT), Moms Against Fluoridation and several individuals on their own filed this petition. The petition was made on the grounds that there's a large body of research that demonstrates that fluoride is neurotoxic which the EPA currently does not recognize. They say it's only toxic to the bones and teeth.

But they have found that it is neurotoxic in the range that water is actually fluoridated in communities, so the range that people are being exposed to constantly in these fluoridated communities are actually possibly suffering neurotoxic effects from that. So they included over 2,500 pages of scientific documentation detailing all the health risks. The EPA actually denied the petition on February 27 of 2017 on the grounds that it had failed to present a scientifically defensible basis to conclude that anyone had in fact suffered neurotoxic harm as a result of fluoride exposure.

So what they did was turn around and actually sue them. They took them to court and that court case has wrapped up recently. I'll just go through the whole thing right now but the current status is that the judge ruled that the EPA had illegitimately denied FAN's 2016 petition for TSCA action and he said that the EPA during these years of litigation has used the wrong standard to assess this evidence. At the end he basically gave it to the EPA. He gave them a chance to reassess given the studies that had been brought forward and the lawyer Connett, who is the guy RFK Jr was interviewing expressed his concern to the court that the EPA has a history of dragging its feet on the issue and that there's enough evidence to take immediate protective action but the judge said that he expects their re-evaluation to be done within months, not years, and the judge made it clear that he has the evidence and he will make a ruling if the EPA doesn't do something about it.

So that's a quick run down of what happened in that case. It's good news, essentially. The judge has said if the EPA doesn't do anything about it then I'm going to do something about it. What is actually done about it is a big question. We don't know because if they start getting a series of fines they could very easily ignore the problem and keep on fluoridating the water in multiple communities where that's happening. But it's hopeful at least. There's a possibility that this might actually end water fluoridation in the US.

Erica: I'm not a big believer in the EPA. I think it's interesting that this case is going through them. We've done a lot about fluoride and the EPA in the past and how they're beholden to big business and they're easily bought and paid for. So I don't have a lot of faith but I do think the video is worth watching. What stuck out to me as most important is that they really want to present this the way they did with lead when gasoline was leaded and the neurotoxic effects that it had on children in particular and how eventually lead was banned and that's why we all have unleaded gas in the US. But it seems like these types of things take years, if not decades and as RFK Jr. let the lawyer know, "Well now you can sit back and enjoy a cigar because you worked your ass off pretty much to get this information out and you did a phenomenal job".

For people who don't follow all these kinds of in-depth lawsuits, very basically this is something in the environment that may help prevent cavities - which we're all told - because of the neurological effects, I'd rather have a brain than not have cavities personally. {laughter}

And again, the biggest effects are on children, especially pregnant women prenatally because their blood brain barrier isn't developed enough so if you're drinking fluoridated water and you're pregnant, you are affecting your fetus and I think that's concerning, just like lead was concerning. So that may be a good way that they chose to go about dealing with that.

Elliot: It seems as though it has taken so long to come about and as you just said Erica, sometimes it takes time for these things to happen. It makes it substantially more difficult when you have financial interests involved because there are financial interests involved in fluoridating water, that's for sure. It's in many respects a business model and it has been sold to the general public on false grounds completely from a scientific basis. There are many false assumptions and when you dig into some of the literature on the specifics of water fluoridation and on the types of fluoride that is present, it turns out that the type of fluoride that they put into the water supply has nothing to do with benefits for teeth. We're dealing with two different types of fluoride bound to different kinds of minerals.

So actually it seems as though this whole premise is based on lies, based on false evidence and based on lies. Unfortunately they've been fluoridating water in the US for what? Seventy years now? More than 70 years nearly. It's one of the many lies that has gone unchallenged and hopefully it will come to light. Unfortunately that doesn't make it any better for the people who've been damaged by fluoride, knowingly and unknowingly.

But there's hope, right?

Doug: Yeah. It's interesting because the case for fluoride for teeth has always been pretty weak. A lot of the evidence for it came from them looking at the historical data and saying, "Oh yeah, there wasn't any fluoride in the water and people had bad teeth and then they put fluoride in the water and suddenly everybody had good teeth." But the thing is, if you compare communities that underwent fluoridation and those that didn't you actually see that there was an improvement in dental health across the board regardless. Take fluoride out of the picture completely and there was an improvement in dental health across the board. Who knows what it came from? It might have just been that people were more conscious about oral health. It could be any number of things.

It might also have been the fact that people became more concerned with oral health, flossing and brushing and all that sort of thing. There might be some evidence for topical use of fluoride but that's not the same thing as swallowing it. There is no evidence that actually ingesting fluoride helps with your teeth at all. There isn't any evidence for that. With topical applications there's some. That could maybe be argued that putting fluoride on topically and then spitting it out, not actually swallowing it, might actually help your teeth. But even with that there's a lot of debate on it. It's not a clear cut picture by any means.

So the fact that they just continue to hold to these myths and insist on this fluoridation, it is lies essentially, like you said Elliot. It is just building up a case on the back of lies.

Elliot: Looking at some of the basics for the audience - and bear in mind I'm by no means an expert in fluoride chemistry, I think it's enormously complex - but based on the very, very basic chemistry of fluoride - and this is stemming from a very good article, a scientific paper called The Physiologic Conditions Affect Toxicity of Ingested Industrial Fluoride. Now I've got to give it to the authors of this paper. They're not messing around. They are very vocal that industrial fluoride added to the water supply is fundamentally harmful for human beings.

So they present a very good scientific argument for this. Now when we talk about fluoride, fluoride is a mineral. There's no physiologic function in the human body for fluoride, meaning that the body doesn't require fluoride to function normally. It's debated as to whether we could use it for a purpose or not but generally the intake of fluoride is very low. We might find it naturally in some water supplies. I'm talking about natural well water, mountain water or whatever it is from a spring. Some might have fluoride naturally occurring, others might not.

Now the quality of water is not determined by the fluoride content. It's somewhat irrelevant as to whether it's got fluoride in it or not. The type of fluoride that you find naturally occurring in a water is called calcium fluoride. It's good to know that fluoride is what is called a chelator for calcium. It can bind with calcium. They have a relationship with one another. So generally calcium is bound very tightly with fluoride and that's the type that we find naturally in nature.

Now this is insoluble. What that means is that we don't absorb much of this at all, if any. So the amount that you get in water is so miniscule and the amount that's absorbed is so miniscule that in many respects it's irrelevant. On the other hand, if we look at industrial fluoride, which is what they fluoridate the water with, it's a chemical by-product, I believe, from the aluminium industry. Is that correct?

Doug: One of the industries, yeah.

Elliot: One of the industries. There's probably loads, right? So they come up with this unnatural manmade chemical. This is sodium fluoride. So the mineral that fluoride is bound to is different. It's not calcium. It's sodium. What that means is it's highly soluble. That means that in water it dissociates and that means that we absorb a lot of it. So right there immediately we see a primary difference between calcium fluoride and sodium fluoride (industrial fluoride). One is basically indigestible or nonabsorbable. We take it in the gut and it goes out. The other one we absorb almost all of it.

Now there are some fundamental problems with sodium fluoride in that this is highly neurotoxic. The arguments which are based on this idea that fluoride is good for the teeth and that fluoride is not toxic is based on calcium fluoride because what they found is that the toxicity level for naturally occurring calcium fluoride is very, very low, meaning that you need a lot, I think 3,600 mg per kilogram body weight to experience a lethal dose. On the other hand, we compare that to sodium fluoride and sodium fluoride, because you absorb so much of it, that means that the toxicity level is much, much, much higher.

So there have been several cases of individuals who have actually died there on the spot from having too much fluoride. Basically what happens is when sodium fluoride gets into the stomach, because the stomach is acidic, it forms something called hydrofluoric acid I think it is, and that's what is absorbed. That is a highly toxic chemical. There was a case in 1994 where the local council or municipality accidently put a little bit too much fluoride into the water and this ended up with an individual who died there and then from a heart attack. He was a 41-year-old male.

Now what happens is that one of the ways that fluoride is so toxic is its effect on the heart. We have to understand that it has to do with this relationship between calcium and fluoride. So whichever tissue in your body needs a lot of calcium, fluoride can negatively impact that tissue. So the heart needs calcium to keep on beating. It's one of the only tissues in the body that requires calcium at such a high level and if you don't have calcium you can end up with a heart attack where you essentially die.

Fluoride in its sodium form, its industrial form, one of the main ways that it kills people or that it causes toxicity is chelating calcium causing someone to become deficient in calcium and immediately, in many cases, it causes a fatal heart attack there and then. I suspect - I'm not sure of the mechanisms, I should have looked into this - but I suspect this is probably one of the reasons why it's so detrimental to the nervous system because in the nervous system you have to understand the way that the cells function - it applies to all cells but particularly in the nervous system - the cells use different minerals to fulfil different functions.

So in the nerve cells you have these things called calcium channels. These are really important for how nerves and neurons are firing. If you have a calcium chelator or fluoride, just acting on that mechanism alone, that is without a doubt doing to affect how the nerves or how the neurons function. I think there's probably multiple other ways this is, that it can calcify the pineal gland or calcify different areas of the brain, mainly because it's binding with calcium and it's taking it to places where it shouldn't ordinarily be.

But there's lots of research showing that there is an inverse correlation between industrial fluoridation in water and children's IQ. That's been very well established. It's been known that industrial fluoridation causes dental fluorosis and unfortunately the area that I grew up in, a small village, was one of the only areas in the UK that was fluoridated and I am pretty sure that I succumbed to some fluorosis growing up. From what I know I don't think that's reversible but ultimately it's robbing the body of calcium. It's taking it from tissues that need it so that can be the bones, the enamel of the teeth.

In many cases the main storage of fluoride in people who do drink water which is fluoridated, it gets stored in the bones. Then what that does is the body's sequestering fluoride in the bones but then that actually reduces the strength of the bones. So this is one of the reasons why it's thought to play a key role in fracture rates, in osteopenia or osteoporosis or any of these other kinds of bone-related conditions that the elderly tend to experience at higher rates than usual or higher rates now than they did historically. It's potentially because of this excessive water fluoridation. There's loads of ways that this negatively affects the body but it's an abomination that it was ever allowed to occur!

But now we've got the science to back it up it seems pretty clear that they need to stop doing this as soon as possible.

Doug: I always found it really crazy that on the back of toothpaste tubes you'd have the number for poison control {laughter} and told to dial it if your child ate too much toothpaste and meanwhile they're just dumping it into the water! How does that make any sense at all? Something that's in the water all the time shouldn't be a poison.

But interestingly you mentioned the IQ thing too Elliot. There was one article called The Historical Court Case - The Fluoride Cover Up Will Soon Be Exposed. It's from a while ago but it was covering the same case but there was a pull quote partway down the page that says, "As of 2020 there have been 72 fluoride IQ studies of which 64 found a lower IQ among children with higher fluoride exposure. Many of the earlier studies were in places with elevated natural fluoride levels. There is now very strong evidence that fluoride damages both the fetal and infant brain at the levels used in artificially fluoridated areas."

So I just thought I'd mention that. One other thing that is actually mentioned in that interview with Connett by RFK Jr., he mentions that it's actually fairly well established - you can correct me if I'm wrong in this Elliot - but I think it's fairly well established that fluoride actually decreases the effectiveness of the thyroid. It actually modulates the thyroid in a negative manner, so much so I think that in cases of hyperthyroid they actually used to use fluoride to bring the thyroid back into more balance.

But one of the mechanisms by which they think that the IQ lowering mechanism is through that lowering of the thyroid in pregnant mothers. It has also been well established that women when have a low functioning thyroid when pregnant, it can be detrimental to the IQ of their children once they're born. So women drinking fluoridated water while they're pregnant have a lower thyroid and therefore end up with children with lower IQs. It's not a smoking gun but it's a theorized mechanism there.

Elliot: Well if we look at the chemical family, if you look at fluoride on the periodic table, it's part of a family of different elements which are referred to as the halogens. So in the halogens you have bromide or bromine, iodine, fluorine and chlorine. So they're all very much related. You only use one of them as a nutritional element and that's iodine. But unfortunately because the halogens share a similar chemical structure, let's say, then what can happen is that the intake of other of the halogens, other elements of that group, so instead of iodine, intake of bromine, intake of chlorine or intake of fluorine as fluoride, a similar thing, can affect the tissues or the cells in a way that the halogen is meant to - how to explain this? - basically too much chlorine, bromine or fluorine in the form of fluoride can displace iodine or it can bind to the cells which iodine are meant to bind to but it can block the function of those cells.

So for instance in the thyroid gland, we need iodine, we need selenium to make thyroid hormone. You have two main thyroid hormones - you have four but you have two main ones - one is T4 and one is T3. The 4 in T4 actually stands for 4 iodines. T3, three iodines. So iodine is so essential for making thyroid hormone. You cannot make thyroid hormone without it. But if you've got a bunch of fluorine as fluoride, same applies to bromine, same applies to chlorine. What this can do is displace iodine. It can bind to the thyroid in place of iodine but the thyroid can't use it as it would iodine.

So this is a real problem. That's an excellent point. I didn't mention that but that I think is probably one of the other primary mechanisms by which fluoride harms the human body. If we look at Hashimoto's thyroiditis, hypothyroidism, hyperthyroidism, thyroid conditions are skyrocketing, particularly in the US. So it's another reason to add to the list as to why the health of the general population is declining at such a rapid rate, aside from all the other things we talk about on this show, {laughter} countless different elements, countless different factors. Fluoride is another one to add to the list.

Erica: There was also an article carried on SOTT several years ago about fluoride Poison In Your Tap Water and they talked about some other effects of fluoride on your body. It accelerates the aging process, causes genetic damage, contributes to arthritis and joint pain, increases the incidence of cancer and tumour growth and interrupts DNA repair. One thing that was interesting was their talking about contributing to arthritis and joint pain. They're saying the first sign fluoride has poisoned your bones is that you have pain in your joints, which in the US is very common. As you both were saying earlier, almost every major city in the US has fluoride added to the water. It is a state issue/community issue. In the video they were saying that Portland is the only one that doesn't add fluoride to the water.

But they were talking about this joint pain and so many Americans have it and doctors aren't making that connection, that you're drinking fluoridated water. Obviously doctors aren't making a lot of connections. {laughter}

Doug: True.

Erica: It just seems like with these accelerated issues, especially in aging people, you would think that this type of information would be key. "Are you drinking fluoridated water? Maybe you should start drinking bottled water." Things like that. It just seems so pernicious to accelerate the aging process, do genetic damage. But again, as I was saying in the beginning, so you have fewer cavities? {laughter} I don't know.

Doug: Fewer cavities but you're crazy.

Erica: And you can't walk or move because your bones and joints are stiff.

Doug: But you've got a perfect smile.

Erica: Yeah.

Doug: One of the things that I think is so egregious about this is that it is something that is just completely 100% unnecessary. A lot of the things we talk about on the show, other toxicities that are out there might be the result of some kind of industrial process or through farming or something like that with the glyphosate for example. They're ignoring the negative effects because they're getting some kind of benefit out of it. But with fluoride, there is no benefit. There's nothing. They're just adding it to the water for no reason. They say they have a reason but there is literally no reason!

I guess what I'm saying is that other things, as a result of industrial pollution they might say, "We need this industry and it's an unfortunate consequence" or something like that. But with the fluoride there's nothing! There's no reason for them to be doing this which is why it has a special place in my heart, a little bit of hate there for this process.

Erica: This is just a short point, we won't go much into it, putting on the tinfoil hat, it's intentional. The fact that they add it to frozen foods, it's in all beverages that they're making - beer, wine, especially in the US if you're using US water sources to make these types of beverages. In past shows we've talked about it, actually dumbing people down!

Doug: They put it in medications too.

Erica: Yeah. It could really be more nefarious than just, "Oh, we don't really know the science."

Doug: Totally. There's the whole connection - we can continue down this road of the tinfoil hats stuff - there's the whole connection to the pineal gland, the idea that the pineal gland is actually what connects us to higher things. We won't go too much into that I guess, but the idea that this element is actually calcifying that gland, making it less functional, cutting you off from those higher influences. Maybe it's not by accident.

Erica: We shall see, right? In the age where slowly things are being revealed.

Doug: Yeah. Well I guess that's probably what we had to say about fluoride this week, unless you guys had anything you wanted to add.

Elliot: Fluoride is not good. {laughter}

Doug: Bingo! And on that point, thanks so much for joining us everybody. Be sure to like and subscribe if you so desire. We will be back next week with another fantastic show. Talk to you soon.

Good-byes.