Fluorine and Dental Caries

A few years ago the discovery was made that fluorine in food and water had an influence on the incidence of tooth decay. Just what are the facts in this relationship?

As yet we are in the dark about the basic biochemical principles involved. Regardless of that present situation of ignorance, we are being rushed by certain interests into a headlong program for adding fluorine compounds to our drinking water long before we know what the effects may be of such wholesale drugging of the population.

The general facts regarding the causes of tooth decay were reviewed in a paper prepared by myself back in 1923.¹ A survey of the literature at that time showed that tooth decay was greatest by far in children who had such poor nutrition that their resistance was lowered not only to tooth decay, but also to all other disease of childhood.. Among school children, the ones that were relatively immune to dental caries were the same ones who had not had the various children’s diseases such as measles, mumps, scarlet fever, frequent colds, etc.

It was evident that the endocrine gland system of the child that had failed to get good food was weakened so that they were more susceptible to any infectious condition including tooth decay, which is, in the last analysis, just as much of a result of lowered resistance as tuberculosis, which might be called decay of the lungs.

Dr. McCarrison had already at that time, in 1921, in fact, written his monumental book Studies in Deficiency Disease. This showed in detail how the endocrine glands were destroyed progressively by bad food, food like white bread, refined sugar and all the rubbish sold as food in packages in the grocery stores. Today, we are being told about new wonder drugs like ACTH and Cortisone, not realizing that the only possible reason we ever need such expensive medication is because our supplies of these glandular products have been exhausted by the starvation of our own glands out of functional existence through our unwitting use of foods that have been so adulterated that their original food values have been largely destroyed.

If fluorine is necessary as a part of this better nutrition we need, we had better look carefully into the matter and see that the kind offered us as a substitute for the natural food intake is suitable for food use.

The evidence here warns us that somebody is going all out on the old racket of selling us a cheap substitute for a costly food. It is probable that fluorine as a food is only that kind of fluorine that has entered into an organic combination by passing through plant life before we make use of it. Inorganic fluorine is a cumulative poison, which means that it accumulates in the body even if taken in very small doses. Organic fluorine does NOT accumulate in the body regardless of the dosage, and is unquestionably far more effective in preventing dental decay.² Whole wheat grown in Deaf Smith County, Texas, contains up to 700 ppm. of fluorine³ but never has caused fluorosis, while inorganic fluorine in drinking water may cause much fluorosis even in amounts as small as .9 ppm.⁴

Many of our nutritional mineral elements are poisonous in the inorganic state, but indispensable food in the proper organic combination. Cobalt is one, zinc is another. Organic cobalt is known as vitamin B-12. When the organic form of fluorine is ultimately discovered, it probably will be identified as one of the members of a well known vitamin complex, just as organic cobalt has been catalogued as the twelfth offspring of vitamin B complex. (The B family has at this date reached the total number of 15.)

Inorganic cobalt is poisonous to the human system, and cannot be used in any way until converted by soil microbes into B-12. Fluorine probably is worse in being a cumulative poison, as it accumulates in the bones and makes them more and more brittle if taken in as the inorganic form. There is no known antidote for this process.

Most of the cattle in this country have this stony state of bones. And the bone carving industries using cattle bones prefer those from Argentina, where cattle bones become resilient and tough, more like ivory in texture, apparently by reason of a lesser amount of inorganic fluorine in the water supplies.

Our Food & Drug authorities consider the fluorine content of most cattle bones as too high for safe use as bone meal sources for supplying mineral nutritional supplements to the diet. It is the cumulative nature of fluorine as a poison that necessitates this ruling.

So the dangers of reckless use of fluorine seem too obvious to permit the wholesale addition of this element to drinking water before the test installations are completely reported on. A 10 year period was stated to be essential before any reliable statistics were to be available. That was when the first fluoridation was begun back in 1947. Why this haste at the present moment? Who is pushing this dangerous procedure, and why?

In looking into the commercial influences responsible, we find two gangs of unsavory characters. One is the concern that has been wrecking our bread by promoting the sale of oxidizing flour bleaches for the last 40 years, the firm which supplies the apparatus to feed and measure properly the poisons used in both procedures–flour bleaching and water fluoridation. The other gang is the one which for years has whooped up the use of aluminum as kitchen utensils. It seems that fluorides are byproducts of the aluminum industry.

First a few words on flour bleaches: They destroy all oxidizable vitamins, and since these vitamins are the ones that protect us from heart disease, we have become a nation celebrated for having heart disease as the foremost cause of death, and the main reason for draft rejections.

That statement is so easily proved that no one can honestly deny it. All you need to do is to. run a cardiographic recording on one or 10 people, give them a daily requirement dose of the vitamins lost by oxidation in wheat, and recheck their heart. In 90 per cent of the persons tested, a 10-minute interval is all that is necessary to show a vast improvement in rhythm and muscular function. This proves, I would say, beyond doubt that those persons are having their health undermined, and their lives shortened by the deficiency directly resulting from flour bleaching.

This simple fact has been cleverly suppressed so that not one doctor in 50 is aware of it. Just who is managing this suppression of life-saving information? I would say those who are profiting by the suppression–the flour millers or the flour bleach promoters.

If these facts were properly known by the doctors we depend upon for treatment of our ailments, I am sure that the statistics of heart disease would very soon drop to a small fraction of those of the present. In one survey, we found that the danger of incurring a fatal attack of heart disease was 35 times more in a person failing to get these wheat vitamins. Thirty-five persons died in a group getting no extra vitamins, before one died in a similar group that was getting the vitamins. Similar figures have been reported by the Shute Institute in Canada.

A syndicate that will suppress such information to make money for its members, certainly will have little compunction in saddling the use of fluorides in poison forms upon us to make us believe that we are preventing tooth decay. Maybe it will; no doubt the intestinal flora of the child will in some degree convert the inorganic fluorine into organic. But what of the greater part that is NOT converted, that part which remains in the bone tissues, and renders the bones brittle, and acts to poison glandular cells? For the sake of safety, we should not take into our food regime ANY INORGANIC FLUORINE AT ALL.

The enrichment of flour with counterfeit synthetic vitamins is another colossal crime to be laid at the door of these schemers. If you have any idea that a synthetic vitamin can substitute for a natural one, please take the trouble to read Report No. 6 of the Lee Foundation. There is no test yet made to my knowledge, either on animals or humans, that failed to prove the synthetic product was incompetent to act as a substitute for natural products.

We also know that in treating heart disease there is no practical substitute for the natural vitamins. We know that 90 per cent of heart patients can live normal lives, forget their troubles, and live long enough to die of old age or some other ailment, if their nutritional program is properly corrected. I say that from seeing it happen for the last 22 years in every part of the United States, and in the clientele of about 20,000 physicians who are aware of the truth about nutrition and heart disease.

The partnership with the aluminum interests seems natural, because both have criminally hoodwinked the American public for many years. Aluminum is poisonous to both plant and animal cells, if in soluble forms.⁵ It combines with phosphorus that may be part of vitamin groups, and thereby destroys the vitamin. So it can cause serious deficiencies even in small repeated and continual dosages.

Three of the nation’s greatest scientists support me in that statement–Dr. Albert Matthews, Dr. Victor Vaughn, and Dr. Gideon Wells. Their testimony was recorded in a proceeding of the Federal Trade Commission, and later suppressed by the Commission, apparently by reason of political pressure, and has been withheld from the public for 25 years. More of that story is available in Lee Foundation Report No. 5.

The person incurring such deficiencies may note no symptom other than a gradual loss of some essential nerve function, a paralysis that creeps upon him without warning. Such paralytic diseases are becoming more and more common.

Many physicians and dentists are stampeded into supporting these misrepresentations, for the power wielded by these pressure groups is remarkable in its ramifications. But in every case, these fellows are totally incompetent to support their opinions with facts in a debate. Instead, they devote their efforts to smearing and vilifying the opposition. They take the attitude that no one should criticize or doubt officialdom. They pass the buck when asked for facts by quoting authorities which, when investigated, say far less than they are purported to have said. They even resent the insinuation that their statements should have such support.

But the real common sense basis for not wanting our water poisoned goes back to the basic principles of all pure food laws. The contamination of food or drink with any poison, in any amount, regardless of the smallness or apparent harmlessness, is ADULTERATION. A brewer who permitted harmless quantities of fluorides to get into his beer, after he had used it to sterilize his beer vats, was fined $5,000 for his carelessness, plus a suspended jail sentence of six months.

It is an alarming sign of incompetence in any public official who even entertains the idea of wholesale adulteration of water with a poison.

Dr. Harvey W. Wiley, the first head of the Federal Pure Food & Drug enforcement Administration, was pried out of his job by political pressure back in 1912 because he honestly tried to stop food adulteration. His book of 1930 describes how the Food & Drug Administration had become perverted into the opposite function of protecting the adulterators! (The History of a Crime Against the Pure Food Law, 1930, at your library unless they have lost it–reprint available free, of the last chapter from Lee Foundation, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.)

This activity of the Food & Drug Administration to jump to the defense of food adulterators is demonstrated by the current articles in the American Magazine and Woman’s Home Companion (December 1951), in which Government officials ridicule health foods like blackstrap molasses and wheat germ.

If we all got our quota of wheat germ, there would be no heart disease, in my opinion. As to molasses, it carries the vital vitamins and minerals of the plant juice. Just how vital they are is best shown by the fact that cane sugar can be used to feed bees in winter, beekeepers buying carloads for the purpose. But they cannot use beet sugar, which the chemist says is “chemically identical.” (Like synthetic vs. natural vitamins.) Beet sugar will kill bees right now.

Why this difference? I suppose because the cane sugar has a little residual molasses, it has a pleasant flavor, need not be so completely removed as the beet molasses, which has an offensive taste. So the bee still gets enough mineral and vitamin content in the cane sugar to carry him over until he can select his own vitamins and minerals in the field.

But the wise guy from Washington says molasses is a delusion, as a good food. Who is deluded, do you think? The very tone of these articles brands them as planted propaganda. An honest critic would offer factual material, refrain from vilification and ridicule. These are weapons of the last ditch debater, who knows he is fighting a lost cause, and cannot gracefully accept the inevitable.

At the same time, where the opposition has proven by their own acts that they are criminally guilty of wrongdoing, there is no possible reason to pretend that they are honest citizens. To treat them as such is to be as gullible as they wish us to be. If we have the discretion God gave us, let us use it.

 

References Cited:

1. The Systemic Cause of Dental Caries, Lee Foundation, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
2. “Sodium Fluoride administered in water caused a retention of 3.88 mg. per day; the same quantity of fluorine administered as bone meal caused a retention of only 1.73 mg. daily.” (Jol. Ind. Hygiene, 1943, 25:112, Machle & Largent).
3. Report from Dr. Geo. W. Heard, Hereford, Texas.
4. Chem. & Engineering News, Aug. 22, 1949, p. 2410.
5. The Nature & Properties of Soils, Lyon & Buckman, MacMillan, 4th Ed., p. 301.