Book Review by Sofia Smallstorm

The Fluoride Deception
by Christopher Bryson

I only review books that are beyond good. This one is absolutely amazing – a fascinating, pleasurable read and a gold mine of information. Where to begin?

The element fluorine has unmatched chemical potency. Is that a good place to start? What this means: Fluorine is very, very reactive, with a need to seize electrons from other elements around it. It can cut through steel like butter and it burns asbestos.

“Because of its extreme reactivity,” explains author Christopher Bryson, “fluorine is usually bound with other elements. These compounds are known as salts, or fluorides. ... Yet the chemical potency of fluorides is also dramatic. Armed with a captured electron, the toxicity of the negatively charged fluoride ion now comes, in part, from its tiny size. Like a midget submarine in a harbor full of battleships, fluoride ions can get close to big molecules, where their negative charge packs a mighty wallop that can wreak havoc, forming powerful bonds with hydrogen and interfering with the normal fabric of such biological molecules.” That’s a sample of Bryson’s wonderful writing: science coming alive with imagery. From this single example, let us begin to contemplate the significance of this deadly material finding its way into our toothpaste and drinking water.

Anti-fluoridationists have told us for years that fluoride is a byproduct of the aluminum and fertilizer industries. They’ve told us it’s a neurotoxin and we should protest the fact that we’re being made to drink it. But few know the real story of how all this came to be, and if you read Bryson’s book, you will get a story – not pages of re-hashed statistics and facts.

It’s a story of war. Of racing “the enemy” to full-scale production of the atomic bomb. Fluorine in the form of fluoride, because of its ability to “draw” out metals, was essential to uranium enrichment. Thousands of Americans worked for the war industry, in and around deadly compounds and their toxic fumes. Explosions and accidents were not uncommon, with calamitous effects on surrounding farms, livestock, towns and people. “Foundry fever” consisted of shivering, high temperatures and profuse perspiration. “The knockout blow from fluoride fumes,” Bryson tells us, was followed by “workers turning purple, gasping for breath and coughing up blood. ... Tiny [oxyfluoride] particles penetrated deep into lungs ... [producing] catastrophic health problems, destroying tissue, choking breath, and leaving permanent lung scarring.” Though Americans were far less litigious then than they are today, workers eventually took action and thus, in the eyes of the military, lawsuits soon became “the most serious legal threat to the U.S. nuclear program.”

So ... something had to be done. We learn about Harold Hodge, the government scientist who knew full well that fluoride was a neurotoxin with disastrous effects on human health, yet the city of Newburgh, New York was still used as a test for the fluoridation of public drinking water. The objective? “For half a century assurances from the Public Health Service that water fluoridation is safe have rested on the results of the 1945 Newburgh-Kingston Fluorine Caries Trial ... But recently declassified documents link the wartime Public Health Service’s interest in fluoride to the Manhattan Project. And a trail of papers showing how bomb-program scientists from the University of Rochester secretly monitored the Newburgh experiment, studying biological samples from local citizens – and crudely manipulating at least one other wartime study of fluoride’s dental and toxic effects – suggests that Newburgh was simply another cold-war human experiment, serving the interests of the nuclear industrial state.”

The health of the public was not to interfere with the war industry. Bryson digs out the unknown: Columbia University, 1943 ... a study conducted on the oral health of laboratory fluoride workers. That their teeth were deteriorating was never made public: “The secret version states that most of the men had few or no teeth; they were in large proportion edentulous [toothless] or nearly edentulous.”

Navigating the vast terrain of the fluoride saga in America, Bryson’s book skillfully reveals bits and pieces of a compartmentalized picture that eventually knits itself together, leaving us with the realization that once again, we have been conned, and once again, we are risking health problems that most of us will never know the origins of. What is the effect of fluoride in our toothpaste? We learn that topically applied sodium fluoride does manage to kill the bacteria in our mouths (whose waste erodes our enamel), but systemically ingested fluoride does nothing but weaken our teeth and bones. Yet our water is nonetheless treated with fluoride, supposedly for our teeth.

It was another kind of cover-up. With 350,000 Americans in 92 different occupations having been exposed to fluoride in the workplace (a 1975 US government estimate), the flimsy “proof” that fluoride protected tooth enamel became a good enough reason to put it into drinking water. With vats of fluoride leftover from aluminum smelting and fertilizer production, America had an inexhaustible supply of the stuff, the proper disposal of which would cost companies much more than sending it along to public water-treatment plants.

Enter Edward Bernays, advertising genius and nephew of Sigmund Freud. “Selling fluoride was child’s play,” Bryson recounts of his interview with this 102-year-old wizard in 1993. “‘You can get practically any idea accepted,’ Bernays told me, chuckling. ‘If doctors are in favor, the public is willing to accept it.’” How to get doctors on board? Pure and simple trend-setting! Publish articles in newspapers, introduce the word for the new trend in dictionaries and encyclopedias, and presto! – fluoridation is suddenly the train everyone wants to get on. And who led the charge to protect our children’s teeth? America’s most trusted pediatrician – Dr. Benjamin Spock.

The combined efforts of government and media effectively suppressed all the dirt on a substance that is not only a systemic poison, but is also the nation’s most destructive air pollutant. Silence, however, is golden: In 1957, after a devastating ruling by an Oregon court in the famous Martin v. Reynolds Metals trial, “Washington abruptly terminated monitoring of fluoride levels in the air.” Bryson continues, “There is little doubt that the federal decision to end air monitoring helped the industry. The feared tsunami wave of fluoride litigation from workers and communities did not break.” And the addition of fluoride to drinking water served to obscure the source of fluorosis in Americans, who would not be able to prove that their jobs had made them sick.

Today, with the advent of fluoropolymers (you guessed it! fluorides mixed with plastics), we have a vast new array of wondrous products in the form of aerosols, waterproofers, pesticides, lubricants and firefighting foams, greaseproof food wrappers, fabric stain-guards, Teflon and super-plastics. The dangers of PFCs (perfluorocarbons) parading through our daily lives are again not shared with us by those who developed them, or even federal regulators, for that matter. The durability and tenacity of these super-materials and the carbon-fluorine bonds within them creates new meaning for the word persistence, one scientist observes. And innocently, like the obedient consumers we have been made into, we are taking them in.