Date: 1931–Present
Location: Worldwide
The Conspirators: Governments and municipal water suppliers
The Victims: Innocent civilians
Claims that the government adds fluoride to our water to harm us are everywhere you look. Some say fluoride is a dangerous neurotoxin and the government wants to give us all brain damage so we can be easily controlled. Some say fluoride is a poison and the government wants to kill us as part of some mass eugenics or population control scheme. Others believe the government just wants to make us generally sick so that we will have to purchase more pharmaceutical drugs. About the only thing they agree on is their belief that the government’s official story about adding fluoride to prevent tooth decay is just a cover-up. As final evidence that fluoridation is a nefarious project of the US government, activists point out that many European nations choose not to fluoridate their water at all.
Fluoride is added to America’s drinking water supplies at a rate of 0.7 parts per million (ppm), which is high enough to reduce tooth decay, and low enough to avoid tooth discoloration. The government wants to harm cavity-causing dental plaque, not you.
The idea that fluoridation is an evil government plot received its most public exposure in the 1964 movie Dr. Strangelove, in which the antagonist, General Ripper, says:
Do you realize that fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous Communist plot we have ever had to face? . . . Do you realize that in addition to fluoridating water, why, there are studies underway to fluoridate salt, flour, fruit juices, soup, sugar, milk, ice cream? . . . It’s incredibly obvious, isn’t it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual. Certainly without any choice. That’s the way your hardcore commie works.
But the actual genesis of fluoridation has a much more down-to-earth cause. In 1901 a Colorado dentist named Dr. Frederick McKay noted that a lot of his patients seemed to have brownish teeth, and that those patients had better dental health than those with white teeth—with only about a third as many cavities! He called it Colorado Brown Stain. Dr. McKay subsequently spent thirty years collecting data on tooth discoloration and tooth decay. He even visited parts of Texas where brown teeth were so common that they were simply called Texas Teeth. The data were clear: the browner the teeth, the less likely they were to decay.
Then, in 1931, scientists working with Dr. McKay discovered that high natural fluoride levels in the drinking water were responsible for both the dental discoloration and the resistance to decay. High levels of fluoride in drinking water create dental fluorosis, or harmless discoloration. This very same fluoride confers a hardness to the tooth enamel that make it resistant to decay. If you wanted healthy teeth, it seemed you had to take the bad with the good.
But many years of study eventually taught us that we could reduce the fluoride levels just enough to avoid the ugly dental fluorosis, but still protect against tooth decay. This level has been adjusted a few times, but the best data we have now shows that a level of 0.7 parts per million is ideal. When the city of Grand Rapids began a fifteen-year test of fluoridated municipal water in 1945, cavities dropped by 60 percent, making tooth decay a preventable disease for the first time in history.
So how did we get from an important public health measure to a 1964 movie talking about it as a Communist plot? During the Red Scare of the 1950s—a period of hysterical fear of Communist influence within the United States—many patriotic Americans began taking a dim view of anything they perceived to be Communist or Socialist in nature. For some, public measures such as vaccination and welfare were regarded as the leading edge of Communism forcing its way into American society. Fortunately, this was still a fringe view that most people didn’t take very seriously, and by the time Dr. Strangelove was produced, irrational fear of fluoridation was seen by most as a comically silly viewpoint, so the filmmakers gave it to their character who had a mental illness. Although it was merely a Hollywood black comedy, Dr. Strangelove did have the effect of making fluoride conspiracy-mongering more mainstream.
But then the 1970s came along with its hippie and New Age movements, where anything technological was out, and anything natural was in. As this perspective has become more and more popular in the decades since, concerns about fluoride in the water have grown increasingly common. In fact, for the first time in the history of modern medicine, we are actually seeing a public health measure beginning to fail as a growing number of cities and towns are deciding to take fluoride out of their water supply.
Whether conspiracy theorists like it or not fluoride is the thirteenth most common element in the Earth’s crust, so it’s naturally occurring in groundwater and is there to stay. It is not some evil man-made poison. Now, just because a compound is natural does not mean that it’s safe, but the toxicity level of every compound is determined by the dose. Just as oxygen is toxic at a high enough concentration, so is fluoride safe at a low enough concentration.
Most anti-fluoride theorists seem to miss the idea that the term fluoridation often means reducing a high fluoride level. The goal is to bring the fluoride level to 0.7 parts per million; sometimes that means adding fluoride, and sometimes it means taking it out. Removing it is much more difficult and expensive, so some municipalities with naturally high fluoride levels don’t do anything about it. Now, the concentrations of fluoride found in natural groundwater are usually quite low, but are sometimes as high as 20 parts per million. Let’s take a look at the effects:
• Below 0.7 ppm, your teeth are at increased risk of cavities.
• Between 1 ppm and 4 ppm, your teeth are at risk of discoloration from fluorosis, which is totally harmless, just unattractive.
• Above 4 ppm, you are at increased risk of skeletal fluorosis, which is usually without symptoms, but in extreme cases can cause pain in major joints. When Dr. McKay discovered Texas Teeth, the regions where he found it had naturally occurring fluoride levels of between 2 and 12 ppm.
This is why regulators try to keep the levels below 4 ppm in all cases, and right at 0.7 ppm ideally.
It is true that many countries outside of the United States do not fluoridate water, especially in Europe. Although the activists attempt to portray this as enlightened European recognition that all fluoride is poisonous, that’s not true. In these nations, they typically fluoridate salt instead of municipal water. The reason has to do with their infrastructure being different from that of the nations that fluoridate water. It is simply easier and cheaper for them to deliver the ideal concentration by adding it to the salt.
It’s important to note that the Internet is full of sites that provide incredibly bad misinformation about fluoride, much of which is untrue. These claims are so numerous that it is impossible to disprove all of them here. The bottom line is that if you have a question about the safety of fluoridation of water, don’t go to an Internet site that sells magical water filters or supplement products or superfoods they claim will remove fluoride. Instead, simply ask your dentist, who probably knows better.