The day before the election, Democratic Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar joined countless other liberals in mocking Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for the latter’s suggestion that America reduce its high levels of fluoride.
“I was a little shocked that one of their closing arguments for Donald Trump was take the fluoride out of water,” Klobuchar told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Nov. 4. “I guess they’re ending with more cavities.”
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Skepticism of fluoridated water had been lumped in by the liberal establishment with a host of other heterodox views, often dubbed “conspiracy theories,” held by Kennedy and his allies.
Kennedy has harshly criticized fluoride, calling it a neurotoxin and an industrial byproduct. He’s claimed the mineral can cause arthritis, bone fractures, bone cancer, IQ loss, neurodevelopmental disorders, and thyroid disease.
He has pledged that the Trump White House will recommend to communities that they remove it from their drinking supplies immediately after Trump takes office. Trump appeared to co-sign the proposal, saying it “sounds alright to me.”
CNN’s Abby Phillip invited Harvard-trained epidemiologist Dr. Syra Madad onto her show the same day to deride Kennedy’s fluoride criticisms: “I do think there are some rocks to be thrown, frankly, at RFK Jr.”
Madad called Kennedy “dangerous” and said his views on fluoride were “against science.”
“It is safe. It’s not toxic,” Madad told the panel.
“When you look at adding in additional amounts of fluoride, even then, the studies have not proven any significant health adverse effects,” she continued.
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But numerous other health officials and toxicologists believe Madad is wrong.
“I think that there is sufficient data now, largely from the epidemiological literature in multiple populations, done by different investigators, that early life exposure to fluoride is associated with an increased risk of IQ loss,” Dr. Linda Birnbaum, a board-certified toxicologist and former director of the National Toxicology Program (NTP), told the Daily Caller.
Birnbaum headed the NTP, a division of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), from 2009 to 2019. She is now an adjunct professor at the University of North Carolina’s Gillings School of Public Health, in addition to still contributing research to HHS.
During her tenure, the NTP conducted a systematic review of the published scientific literature on the association between fluoride exposure and neurodevelopment. It found that exposure to higher levels of fluoride — levels it categorized as 1.5 milligrams per liter of water or higher — are associated with lower IQ in children.
The National Toxicology Program (NTP) has declared, “… the data support a consistent inverse association between fluoride exposure and children’s IQ.”
In the meta-analysis by NTP, 52 of 55 studies revealed a decrease in children’s IQ with an increase in fluoride. Internal…
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) February 7, 2024
The review said there was insufficient evidence to reach a conclusion about the effects of exposure at 0.7 milligrams per liter, which is the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) current recommended level for U.S. community water supplies.
However, Dr. Birnbaum told the Caller, the NTP is running a comprehensive meta-analysis of the data that will likely show the linked drop in IQ rate is occurring at rates well below the 1.5 milligrams per liter number.
In fact, while Dr. Birnbaum maintained she hasn’t yet seen the newest version of the meta-analysis, older versions she did see show “that it’s quite clear that there may be really no safe level of fluoride just like there’s no safe level for lead,” she said.
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Nearly all of the studies the NTP reviewed concluded the mineral was neurotoxic, Stuart Cooper, executive director of the Fluoride Action Network, told the Daily Caller.
The 1.5 number, which the NTP concluded with “moderate confidence” leads to lowered IQ in children, is in line with the World Health Organization, whose current guidelines suggest maintaining levels below that concentration will prevent dental fluorosis, a yellowing or visible calcification of the teeth caused by excessive fluoride exposure.
Cooper argued that the NTP’s report was partially political.
“If you were actually doing a real systematic Health Hazard Assessment, do you think you would just magically land on 1.5, which happens to be the World Health Organization’s recommended level?” he asked. “It would be like point 82763, you know, it wouldn’t be exactly 1.50, what happened? [The report] just coincided miraculously with the World Health Organization? That’s where politics was kind of embedded into this document.”
Cooper, who has spent over 14 years ringing alarm bells about fluoride, says his organization has repeatedly requested supporting studies from the CDC and the American Dental Association (ADA) that prove fluoride is safe but “after 80 years they had nothing.”
“They couldn’t confirm. They have no studies showing that low levels are safe for the developing brain. So here they are exposing 200 million Americans, 2 million pregnant women, 300,000 exclusively bottle-fed infants right at this very second to fluoridation in the drinking water. We have 64 studies showing that that’s harmful, that poses an extreme risk. They have zero studies confirming safety. And yet they want you to ask me to find more evidence.”
The CDC lauds fluoride as a landmark innovation in preventing tooth decay and caries, otherwise known as cavities. The agency calls community water fluoridation one of the “top ten public health achievements of the twentieth century.”
Thanks to water fluoridation in the U.S., the CDC claims “dental caries declined precipitously during the second half of the 20th century.”
But that precipitous drop has occurred in both fluoridated countries and non-fluoridated alike. Countries with no community water fluoridation like Iceland, Italy and Japan, have all seen even steeper drops in cavities, according to data from the WHO.
“Although the prevalence of caries varies between countries, levels everywhere have fallen greatly in the past three decades, and national rates of caries are now universally low. This trend has occurred regardless of the concentration of fluoride in water or the use of fluoridated salt, and it probably reflects use of fluoridated toothpastes and other factors, including perhaps aspects of nutrition,” KK Cheng, a professor of public health and the Director of the University of Birmingham’s Institute of Applied Health Research, wrote in the British Medical Journal.
WHO data shows decay rates have dropped at the same rate in non-fluoridated countries: https://t.co/Tg8pLmkoR0 pic.twitter.com/jjFr8yxC2w
— Fluoride Action Network (@FluorideAction) March 18, 2016
Some western communities did remove fluoride from their water and actually saw their cavity rates decrease. Buffalo, New York, a city which removed fluoride in 2012, saw their rates of cavities for people between the ages of 12-65 drop, according to data from the National Institutes of Health.
Nine years after removing the mineral from their water supply, however, Buffalo began fluoridating again in September after families sued the city in a class action lawsuit, alleging their children had to receive more dental care as a result of the fluoride halt.
Despite the many studies and experts expressing concern over the mineral, CNN and Dr. Madad continued to push both its safety and efficacy in reducing cavities.
“Fluoride is a naturally occurring mineral, it’s not a man-made mineral,” Madad told CNN.
Fluoride is a naturally occurring mineral. It is an ionized form of the element fluorine. Yet Kennedy Jr. called it “industrial waste” in a Nov. 2 tweet.
On January 20, the Trump White House will advise all U.S. water systems to remove fluoride from public water. Fluoride is an industrial waste associated with arthritis, bone fractures, bone cancer, IQ loss, neurodevelopmental disorders, and thyroid disease. President…
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) November 2, 2024
Fluoride does occur in nature, and in fact many of the studies evaluated in the NTP report were from international communities in China and India who do not fluoridate their public water supply, but simply have high natural levels of the mineral in their groundwater.
But the specific type of fluoride that’s added to American public water supplies is often a chemical byproduct from the fertilizer industry, Cooper explained.
Phosphate fertilizer giants, like The Mosaic Company, produce the precursor to fluoride as a byproduct of their fertilizer production process and then sell it off to dental supply companies and municipalities for their water supply, Cooper told the Caller.
Cooper says the byproduct is known within the industry as “scrubber liquor,” because it’s literally a liquid collected from the scrubber systems inside of smokestacks.
The chemical companies make a nice profit from this side business, Cooper told the Caller, however he added that if it were banned in public water supplies, it likely wouldn’t hurt their bottom line.
“It wouldn’t be a big deal for them if it went away economically, because they could just replace it with other markets, including in Africa and China, where they’re seeing an increase in fluoride toothpaste. They actually still use the same product, but it’s refined to pharmaceutical grade,” Cooper said.
While many public health agencies still sing the praises of fluoride’s anti-cavity benefits, some dentists say it’s not as effective in treating cavities as the CDC and others profess.
Dr. Staci Whitman, a Portland-based dentist, said she used to be militantly pro-fluoride until she started looking into it.
“I never questioned what my professors in dental school told me. I never questioned the data that was presented to me. I absolutely thought anyone that spoke out against it was lulu tin foil hat brigade, just a total kook,” she told the Caller.
Staci actively participated in pro-fluoride campaigns, handing out pamphlets detailing the benefits of the mineral and attending lectures and debates on the topic. It was at one of these debates where Dr. Whitman had an epiphany.
“I realized that these people representing antifluoride, if you will, they were very articulate, very professional, had a ton of science and data that I had never seen, never had even heard, never even knew there was potentially an issue with water fluoridation. It wasn’t even on my radar.”
Then, Dr. Whitman began to read. “I don’t know if I can support this anymore,” she realized. “And that was when I thought water fluoridation maybe worked, and now we know it really doesn’t. We know that fluoridated countries have the same decay rate as non-fluoridated countries.”
The vast majority of European countries do not fluoridate their water.
“Most of those countries have banned the practice because they view it as a medical experiment. It’s the only chemical we add to the water supply that’s not intended to treat the water. It’s intended to treat the consumer,” Cooper said.
Florida once again leading the way w/wise public health recs from @FLSurgeonGen
Almost all of Europe (gray👇) decided decades ago against fluoridating water; benefits unclear w/access to topical fluoride
2024 Cochrane review agrees
W/unclear benefits, why take risks of harms? https://t.co/cGDL9FZaSY pic.twitter.com/vCfSTsK9RN
— Tracy Høeg, MD, PhD (@TracyBethHoeg) November 23, 2024
Dr. Whitman said she went along with fluoridation because everybody else did.
“I literally was just making it up. I was just seeing what my professor said, which I would say, ‘Oh, look at you. No cavities. You must have grown up in a fluoridated community.’ I was just saying it because everyone else did. It was observational. That’s not science.”
Dr. Whitman pointed to the latest findings on community water fluoridation from the Cochrane Report, a systematic review of research in health care and health policy which she calls “the gold standard.”
Cochrane reviewed 21 studies of community water fluoridation and found the practice “may slightly increase the number of children who have no tooth decay in either their baby teeth or permanent teeth.”
However, “these results also included the possibility of little or no difference in tooth decay,” the report added.
Cavities are the largest chronic disease globally, affecting both fluoridated and non-fluoridated communities alike, Dr. Whitman explained. Fluoride, she told the Caller, is not the problem. Rather, it’s the food we eat.
“No one gets cavities because of lack of fluoride,” she said.
“Ancestrally, we didn’t have fluoride in our lives. Look at the skulls from 10 or 12,000 years ago. The teeth are pristine. So what changed it was our diet. It was an agricultural revolution and the industrialized revolution we started adding sugar and flour into everything. So fluoride is just a cop out for our issue with our food system and big food and the big sugar industry.”
Dr. Whitman explained she’s not necessarily anti-topical fluoride, and pointed to the widespread availability of fluoridated toothpaste as further evidence for the unnecessary nature of water fluoridation. But she also recommended hydroxyapatite, a calcium and phosphorus based teeth cleaner that is used in Italy, Japan and other western European countries, as a fluoride alternative.
Our teeth, Dr. Whitman explained, are comprised of hydroxyapatite, not fluoride. The use of the alternative can prevent the development of dental fluorosis, which affects 40 percent of teenagers in America today, according to the CDC.
It can also prevent the much more serious skeletal fluorosis, which can severely distort a person’s bones. While communities across the United States add fluoride to their water supplies, governments in India and China and other communities with high natural levels of fluoride have spent millions of dollars on research and removal efforts, Cooper told the Caller.
“The government and many nonprofits have been working for decades to solve that problem. It’s just, it’s just really difficult, and it’s difficult to filter out, and that’s why we get to this point here in the United States where … we voluntarily add it, we self-inflict this harm,” he said.
Both Cooper and Dr. Whitman pointed to the embedded nature of the mineral in standard dental practices as a barrier to change the public perception on its potential harms.
“I don’t think there’s a nefarious action. I think most dentists just don’t know the issue very well,” Cooper said. “When I talk to them at city halls and I talk to them at legislative hearings, the average dentist has been working with topical fluoride their whole life in their dental office. They learned one day in dental school, they heard about the benefits of water fluoridation as settled science, and they believe it, and they care about children.”
Still, he said, the American Dental Association, who publicly endorse water fluoridation, are too deep in defending the practice to change course.
“At this point, it’s a lie that’s too big to fail,” he said. “If they now admit that they were not only wrong, but that many millions of children were harmed by this, there would be a grand loss of trust in the American Dental Association. And unfortunately along the way, as the dental lobby is really wealthy and powerful, they co-opted government in support of this.”
Both experts argued the burden of proof should be on the pro-fluoride side, especially considering the high stakes surrounding neurodevelopment.
“I am trained as a dentist to fix teeth, but I can’t fix a brain,” Dr. Staci said. “We only have one shot at developing a child’s brain.”
Cooper concurred.
“The cavity can easily be filled, but damage to the brain is permanent and has lifelong consequences. There are no second chances with brain development, and we have a large volume of government-funded research that now shows that fluoride at the levels experienced in fluoridated communities is neurotoxic. That’s the scientific consensus. There is no contradictory science. And we have government-funded research showing that for decades, and they knew it, we have been overexposing infants to water fluoridation,” he concluded.
The American Dental Association, in fact, receives millions of dollars from corporations that produce fluoride products, an ADA memo requested by Republican Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley in 2010 revealed.
“These dental product companies were giving different grants … but they were also giving millions of dollars to pay for the ADA’s endorsement of their products,” Cooper said. “You see that ADA seal of approval? Well, the one rule the ADA has to get that seal of approval is your product must contain fluoride. So even if you make a really great Xylitol toothpaste, they’re not going to put their stamp of approval unless you also add fluoride.”
Cooper lauded the Trump administration and Kennedy Jr. for taking action and drawing publicity to the issue.
“What the Trump administration is doing, what RFK is doing is on water fluoridation, is common sense that elected officials ought to be doing at every level,” he said.
Now, some public health officials are following Trump and Kennedy’s lead.
Dr. Joseph Ladapo, Florida’s Surgeon General, officially recommended against community water fluoridation last month, citing “the neuropsychiatric risk associated with fluoride exposure.”
Adding fluoride to water increases the risk of neuropsychiatric disease in children and reduces their IQ. We can strengthen teeth without consuming this neurotoxin.
The data are consistent, adding fluoride to our communities’ water must stop.
See my guidance here:… pic.twitter.com/KCQegirMfZ
— Joseph A. Ladapo, MD, PhD (@FLSurgeonGen) November 22, 2024
His recommendation follows a landmark September decision from United States District Judge Edward Chen in Northern California forcing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to more strictly regulate the levels of fluoride in water under the Toxic Substances Control Act.
“The scientific literature in the record provides a high level of certainty that a hazard is present; fluoride is associated with reduced IQ,” Chen, an Obama appointee, wrote in his decision.
Still, some communities, like Buffalo, New York, are doubling down. Nine years after removing the mineral from their water supply, Buffalo began fluoridating again in September.
Others still express doubt that the studies showing high levels of fluoride linked to neurotoxicity are in any way relevant to the levels at which American water is fluoridated.
“Fluoride can certainly be toxic,” Dr. Ryan Marino, a board-certified toxicologist and professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, told the Caller.
“Acute fluoride toxicity is one of the worst poisonings I can think of. However, the levels of fluoride used for dental health benefits in American drinking water are significantly below the levels that could even start to cause harmful effects and toxicity, and the levels we use have never been shown to cause harmful effects or toxicity,” Dr. Marino concluded.
But given the recent California ruling and Kennedy Jr.’s anti-fluoride campaign, Cooper is hopeful the tide is turning.
“There’s decades of science that we’ve been doing our best to get out there, but it’s been stifled by mainstream media and the ADA,” Cooper said. “Finally, now they can’t keep the lid on it anymore, and it’s just like they don’t know what to do. They’re in a panic.”
