So, now we what the health program is in Health Canada. They go around to see if they see any horns, moose horns, deer horns, goat horns, bull horns, cow horns, and not having found any horns growing on Canadian citizen, they have declared the fluoridation is safe and effective. This is the total, as far as I can see, of the health studies in Canada.
Now, instead of health studies, what they do is reviews of the literature. So, Health Canada did a review of the literature, and they selected six experts to review the literature. Four of the six were dentists who were known to be pro-fluoridation, and they reviewed the literature on safety. Incredible. Four pro-fluoridation dentists out of six people reviewed the safety of fluoridation, and when it came to IQ studies, they said, “The weight of evidence indicates there’s no significant effect of fluoride on IQ.” Where is the weight of evidence? They didn’t cite a single study that had not found this relationship.
This is very bad science, and very bad science has been the name of the game since 1950 as far as fluoridation’s concerned. In 1950, the US government endorsed fluoridation. Not one single trial had been completed, and no health studies of any significance had been published. So, it was political then, and it’s political today. One of the reasons they don’t do the studies is because they don’t want to find harm, because they don’t want to threaten this policy. Something that is driving this policy has nothing to do with teeth and certainly nothing to do with protecting our health.
Now, what it is? I’m not sure, but one that we’re sure is that dentists have controlled this debate for far too long. That’s how they see us. We’re a very big mouth with little legs on it. The only tissue that they’re concerned about are teeth, teeth, teeth, and teeth, and we get study after study after study after study on teeth. Where are the studies on the bottom? Where are the studies on the brain, and so on?
This is what Philippe Grandjean said about this study. By the way Philippe Grandjean is a world famous epidemiologist, particularly famous for his work on mercury. “Fluoride seems to fit in with lead, mercury, and other poisons that cause chemical brain drain. The effect of each toxicant may seem small, but the combined damage on a population scale can be serious, especially because the brain power of the next generation is crucial to all of us.” So, I want to illustrate what he’s saying now with these simple diagrams.
This is what we call the bell-shaped curve. Every human trait is normally distributed. It goes through this shape, which means the average person has the average height, the average weight, the average IQ, but you’re going to get extremes at both tails. In terms of IQ, the two tails, the extremes, are children above an IQ of 130 are very bright or geniuses. The area-under-the-curve, the green area, represents the total people in a population which is in that category, very bright or genius.
The people in that mauve area, unfortunately, are the mentally handicapped, their IQ is less than 70. Now, see what happens when we shift the curve over by five points. The average person goes from 100 to 95. That’s not noticeable. You’re not going to notice that walking down the street. A parent’s not going to notice the difference between two siblings, 100 and 95, nor is a school teacher, but what I want you to look at carefully now is what that shift, that small shift in IQ does to the two tails. It halves the number of geniuses in your society, and it doubles the number of the mentally handicapped.
This has huge social and economic ramifications for any society, any population, especially in the world coming up where having an intelligent population is going to be crucial. Any public health official who is presented with these IQ studies and does not do anything in his power to avoid exposure of our babies to neurotoxins should not be in that job. When you got something as simple to decide as being able to solve the massive exposure to a neurotoxin simply by turning off a tap. When you know that communities that have done this have no difference in tooth decay, the very reason that we’re doing it, and also the more rational application of fluoride via fluoridated toothpaste is readily and universally available, it takes something which is stupid to something which borders on criminal. Really. Yeah, I’m going to answer your question at the end.
The meta-analysis done by Harvard mentions this study, but it doesn’t fit into their meta-analysis because they did a different type of study. They didn’t compare low fluoride and high fluoride village. They simply found out, looked at the IQ of children drinking water between about 0.3 and 3 parts per million. That overlaps the range in New Zealand, 0.7-1 ppm, 0.3-3ppm. Now, what the three concluded was that, “Overall, our study suggested that low levels of fluoride exposure in drinking water had negative effects on children’s intelligence…” This is what they did. They found that the higher the level of fluoride in the urine.
They measured the fluoride levels in the urine, and that measure is an indirect measure of how much the kids were getting on a daily basis. The higher the fluoride intake, the higher the fluoride in the urine. There’s about a two to one ratio because we get rid of about 50% of the fluoride. The 50% goes into the bones, and the 50% that we measure is what does not go into the bone. They found the higher the level of the fluoride in the urine, meaning the higher the exposure to fluoride in that range, the lower the IQ. You’ve got that very strong correlation there. The bottom, actually, is the level of fluoride in the urine. The higher the level of fluoride in the urine, the lower the IQ, a very important study in my view.
I don’t have time to go through all the other health issues, but go through them in a series of chapters in this book.
So, the tricky question of why the Ministry of Health and the local DHBs continue to promote fluoridation. We have to look at this at this at the three levels of bureaucracies, at the bottom, in the middle, and at the top of the bureaucracies, or, if you like, you can rephrase it another way, the chain of command. The chain of command that stretches from the Ministry of Health down to local doctors or the New Zealand Dental Association all the way down to your dentists.
At the bottom of the chain of command, we have thousands of dentists who truly believe that fluoridation works, and, by the way, before we go any further, I do appreciate your coming here today. It took a lot of guts and courage for you to speak out in an audience that’s obviously not on your side. So, hats off to you. This is good for democracy.
So, this is all that dentists were taught in dental school, and now, they’ve already got one dental school in New Zealand, in Dunedin. They’re so busy treating patients that they don’t have time to read the literature. The three of us, retired professors, we had a lot of time to read the literature that we could possibly get our hands on. So, they’re very vulnerable. They’re very vulnerable then to taking shortcuts, believing what their professional bodies tell them, believing them what consultants organized by the government tell them.
There’s a problem here, and the problem is associated from the American Dental Association which wouldn’t know the difference between a bicycle and science. Here’s white they say in a white paper in 1979, “Individual dentists must be convinced that they need not be familiar with scientific reports of laboratory-filled investigations on fluoridation to be effective participants in the promotion program and that nonparticipation is overt neglect of professional responsibility.
Can you imagine any other profession saying that to its membership? Could you imagine engineers saying, “You don’t really have to be an expert on the safety of bridges to support this bridge over here, and if you don’t support it, you’re neglecting your professional responsibility.” So, obviously, this is a pretty sick state of affairs in this profession.
Now, in the middle of the chain of command, bureaucrats are taught very early on not to challenge policy. Policy is established out there somewhere. The policy is established in the center. In the case of health, policy is determined by the Ministry of Health in Wellington, and if you’re working for the District Health Board, your job is to promote that policy.
I would venture to say that if a member of the District Health Board went to any community in New Zealand, and said that fluoridation was a bad idea, they would be fired tomorrow. I haven’t seen anybody disagree with me on that. They are simply obeying orders. It’s a frightening thing, and hats off to any bureaucrat that breaks out of this system. When they do so, they usually threaten their pension, their jobs, and everything else, and we have examples of that, by the way.
So, what we have to be concerned about then, because the middle isn’t going to do much, the bottom is not going to do much. What about the people on the top? What’s their spin on this? Their concern is about fluoridation is losing credibility. For them, to lose fluoridation is to lose credibility. They’ve been promoting this for years and years and years. They told us, it’s the best thing they’ve done. They’ve told us that the people opposed to this are a bunch of Looney Tunes, and so on.
So, if they turn around and say, “We were wrong,” they will lose their credibility, and they feel, I believe, that if they lose their credibility, this is going to threaten other public health policies. This is important because fluoridation as a practice isn’t worth a hill of beans. It’s pathetic. It does not reduce tooth decay. It doesn’t work. Tooth decay does not go up when you stop fluoridation. There are other ways of doing it.
So, why are they expending so much political capital on trying to keep this foolish practice going? I think the answer is they’re protecting something else.
They are protecting other public health practices, and when you get into those other public health practices, they are worth billions. They are worth billions. So, fluoridation is like a skirmish out there to delay the day when they have to defend some of these other public health practices.
Another thing to bear in mind that public health practices require the public’s trust. You have to have the trust of the public. That’s why they’re very reluctant to say it may work. Everything is completely definite. It’s definitely safe and effective. People opposed to it are crazy. It’s definite. They cannot express any doubt if they want the whole public to accept what they’re doing.
It’s a different kind of medicine. Public health medicine is very different from individual medicine when a doctor has a chance to discuss this with the patient. He or she can you give the nuances, can talk honestly about the side effects, and then eventually, you can make the decision, but that’s not the case with public health policies.
