My Old Letter to the Editor on Water Fluoridation: Is Tooth Decay More Important than Brain Decay?

Melissa Dykes Apr 15, 2019

I was looking over some of the oldest content I put up back when I first started Truthstream Media as a blog in 2011, and I came across this letter to the editor I wrote to my local newspaper on the dangers of fluoridating water. This is one of the first topics I became passionate about after I began researching it; hence, one of the first videos I ever made had to do with fluoridation and I’ve made many others over the years. (The one below is my favorite.)

In the years since, I have traveled to Canada and Europe for the first time while filming our documentaries, and I realized that in many other countries around the world, many other governments do not mass “medicate” their citizens like this. Despite what the American Dental Association claims, studies have actually shown that the number of cavities do not go up in communities that end water fluoridation; in fact, in Germany as just one example, researchers found significantly less dental caries after water fluoridation was stopped.

It kind of amazes me that here we are in 2019, and cities across America are still dumping a dangerous byproduct of the fertilizer industry into our municipal water supplies, under the outdated and debunked premise that it’s somehow “good for our teeth” (while also magically managing not to harm the rest of our organs and soft tissues it comes into contact with or our bones where it accumulates over time, potentially causing skeletal fluorosis).

As the short letter below never quite made it over to the new site when Aaron and I relaunched Truthstream Media together back in April 2013 (six years ago today, I just noticed), I thought I’d go ahead and post the original here… for posterity.

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Note: The newspaper has a limit of 400 words or less, or this would have been longer. Feel free to use all or part of this letter in your own city! We need to get poisonous chemicals out of our water supply!! ~Mel

Fluoridation: Is tooth decay more important than brain decay?

Our city needs to reconsider the thousands of dollars we taxpayers spend on water fluoridation. Ever wonder why the United States consistently shows a drop in educational test scores versus the rest of the world? A recent study conducted by Harvard University researchers published in a federal government journal concluded, “Our results support the possibility of adverse effects of fluoride exposures on Children’s neurodevelopment.” Did you know fluoride is listed on the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) database of developmental neurotoxicants as a “chemical with substantial evidence for developmental neurotoxicity”? This may be why New Hampshire recently passed a statewide fluoride warning law.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) “grandfathered” fluoride in before the 1938 drug testing requirement, so fluoride has never even been officially FDA-approved for ingestion in all these years, nor is it on the FDA’s “approved drug” list. Fluoride is a chemical byproduct. Three types are used for fluoridation, one of which is a liquid by-product of phosphate fertilizer manufacturing. Because fluoride medication of our water is done outright, everyone ingests differing amounts depending on size and how much water they drink. The skin, being the body’s largest organ, also takes in fluoride every time we bathe or shower. Fluoride accumulates in our systems, and studies have shown adverse effects on nearly every organ in the body, from reducing thyroid activity to impairing kidney function. According to the National Toxicology Program, a “preponderance of evidence” from lab studies also indicates that fluoride is a “mutagenic compound”. Many mutagenic substances have been known to cause cancer. It makes sense Harvard researchers found fluoride negatively impacted the smaller, developing brains of children even worse than adults.

When we take a drink of water, how much surface time does that mouthful have with our teeth before we swallow it anyway? We ingest fluoride and it travels to every other system in our body, accumulating there. While cavities can certainly be an issue, impaired organs and bodily system function that lowers our overall life expectancy seems a tad direr in the grand scheme of things. Is dental health more important than organ health? While people have cheap, easy access to fluoridated toothpaste and toothbrushes, there is no quick drugstore remedy that can fix potentially permanent organ damage and a forever lowered IQ that studies have shown water fluoridation can cause.