Flouride: Friend or Foe?
Part 1

by Warren A. Mitchell, D.D.S.

Have you ever read the warning label printed on the back of your tube of toothpaste? This is typically what you will find:

Beginning in April, 1997, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has required this warning label on all dental care products containing fluoride.

You may be wondering why the FDA put a warning label for fluoride in toothpaste in 1997 when fluoride had been used in toothpaste for many years, as well as having been used in water fluoridation since 1945. What is fluoride, and why -- 52 years later -- is it now considered a poison?

To begin, the dictionary defines fluorine as a pale yellow, highly corrosive, poisonous, gaseous halogen element. Fluoride is a compound of flourine. Fluoride is the most electronegative and most reactive of all the elements.

The definition of sodium fluoride (found in toothpaste, dental care products and fluoridated water) is a colorless crystalline salt used in fluoridation of water, in treatment of tooth decay, and as an insecticide and disinfectant.

If fluoride is a poison, why is it being put in our water and dental products?

To understand, let's first take a look at the history of what we know about fluoride. Fluorine is the thirteenth most abundant element found in the earth's crust. Up until the Industrial Revolution, most of the fluoride in the environment was safely locked up with other elements in rocks, coal and clay. Only small amounts of fluoride were released as a result of volcanic activity, or by the slow leaching of this element into some waters. With the Industrial Revolution came the burning of coal and the production of products such as aluminum, steel, glass, enamel, brick, and fertilizers. Factories began dumping fluoride into rivers and streams; they polluted the air with fluoride gases and particles.

In the 1930s, H. Trendely Dean, D.D.S., Director of Dental Research for the U.S. Public Health Service (USPHS), conducted extensive surveys of cities in Texas, Colorado and Illinois. From these surveys, he found people with brown spots on their teeth, known as mottled enamel. His surveys showed that as fluoride levels in the water increased, so did the damage to teeth. Dean started publishing incomplete data to show that at 1 part per million (ppm), fluoride produced a minimal amount of brown teeth and resulted in the reduction of tooth decay. This condition of brown teeth, or mottled teeth, is now known as dental fluorosis, and happens during tooth formation. In very mild cases with low levels of fluoride, teeth may appear to have white spots or flecks. In higher concentrations, teeth may have white patchy areas of increased porosity. In severe cases of dental fluorosis, fluoride produces pitting, dark brown staining and widespread disfiguring of the enamel tooth structure. Teeth that are in this state of fluorosis are very brittle, easily broken and highly susceptible to cavities.

Warning signs were posted, advising people not to use high-fluoridated water for cooking or drinking, especially for children. Communities began removing fluoride from public water supplies, and court actions were taken against major industrial polluters for damage to livestock and crops.

By the late 1930s, the many lawsuits against industries such as ALCOA (the world's largest aluminum producer) were increasing and becoming a problem. The growing cost of removing fluoride from public water supplies was also problematic.

At this time, ALCOA was selling their unwanted waste by-product of sodium fluoride as a rat poison and insecticide. However, ALCOA found they had more waste product than they could sell. They needed another market to rid themselves of the excess burden of this hazardous waste.

About the same time, Dr. Gerald Cox, a biochemist from the University of Pittsburgh, was employed as a member of the Mellon Institute (the Mellons were the owners of ALCOA). Cox's job was to do research and find another way to reduce the excess of ALCOA's sodium fluoride waste.

Cox began working in the laboratory with a number of pregnant and lactating rats. He fed them a select diet of fluoride from 10 to 40 ppm. At the end of this research, Cox wrote, "The present trend toward the removal of fluorine from food and water may need some reversals." There was never any solid scientific research done. Though Cox noted in his 1939 paper (published in the Journal of Dental Research) that rats who received more fluoride had more cavities, this information was ignored. Cox gathered information from his "study" and additional information from a study done earlier by Armstrong and Brekhaus, who had reported higher levels of fluoride in dental enamel of healthy teeth than in teeth with cavities. (In 1963, Armstrong recanted his original findings as incorrect and stated that there was no difference in fluoride content between healthy teeth and teeth with decay.) Cox prepared six summaries of the literature on tooth decay for the Food and Nutritional board of National Research Council, which led to the Council's endorsement of fluoridation.

The major companies who produced the unwanted by-products of fluorides could now dispose of their hazardous waste, and at a profit to boot. But to whom? And how did they convince people that rat poison was good for them?

…To be continued in the next issue of Alaska Wellness.

The Wellness Team at Health Centered Dentistry welcomes your questions on this subject and other dental matters. Call 277-2600 for more information, and/or to schedule a visit with us as your next step toward whole body wellness.

Readers can also research fluoride on the Internet at www.saveteeth.org.