fluoride may do bodily harm tonight we examine the fluoride controversy dr bill osmonds in the practice of dentists and a passionate lobbyist to end fluoride in our drinking water joins me tonight is a great pleasure to have you in studio tonight dr thank you bill pleasure to be here flora has enjoyed a long tradition in the united states and probably a lot of other countries are there some new studies out of surface that  indicting there are the health the safety of fluoride absolutely the environmental protection agency asked the national research council that's the highest a scientific body in the united states to review the maximum contaminant level goal maximum contaminant level of fluoride if their standard was protective and the twelve scientists who were called together spent three years and they came to  s maximum contaminant level of floyd was not protective in that they had a huge amount of research that they provided to back up the fact that it was not protective there's been many other research is that if they've come out recently very powerful well i'm curious if there's this kind of research as you just mentioned why are there really so few voices that are you know hollering warning warning well that's a very good question firth i've been a dentist for thirty years for the first twenty five i promoted water fluoridation i thought i saw it in my patients as a benefit and when we keep looking for something we tend to find what we're looking for and i found what i was looking for and it was beneficial so i didn't look at the research anymore because i thought it was beneficial i think many dentists and scientists are the same as i was we just haven't looked at the current science why it's supposed to be safe it's supposed to be good and i don't pay any attention to it so i don't think scientists are looking at the science that's the biggest problem well let's talk a little bit about some of the science has got to be some compelling research that yes stumbled on tell me a little bit about what number one fluorida no longer reduces dental decay the e p a union scientists are say that it borders on a criminal act of governments because it doesn't reduce dental decay that's its only purpose is to reduce dental decay and it's no longer doing that there are many research organizations their publications by zimmer and others that have said you know europeans have been not florida dated employee for many years or never have their decay is reduced just the same as ours if you compare places that have never florida did with those that have florida did same thing decay rates in the same we don't see any benefit from fluoridation in fact it was just this fall two thousand and seven where the journal of american public health dentistry the journal of public health industry there we go came out with an article that again showed a comparison between portland oregon and vancouver and there was no reduction in dental expenses in fact for many groups there was more costs for dentistry in the florida to dairies the non florida years were knots being a benefit yet we're still beholden oldest i guess i call it the halo effect of fluoride well there is a certain halo but but that means that if we have fluoride in one area other people get some of that that water because they're drinking or traveling and there a child at home may not be florid in water but at school they are so there's sort of a halo effect there but the europeans don't drink more american water than americans so the halo effect can go a little ways but it doesn't go a long ways and we don't eight this year we shouldn't be doing it you know they have socialized medicine socialized dentistry the government has every reason to try to use good public health protective measures to reduce their expenses and they don't do it effectiveness of those trees you think floor i would be right in their crosshairs that what are they up to and that's what we think but public health then that public health officials are into the marketing of it they don't look at the science they look at marketing they promote it it's like the p r department of a corporation they promote the product they're not the engineers that design or manufacture it they just advertise and promote the products of public health official i don't look at the science they just are told to promote something and they promoted dutifully they don't look at the science what what is there that you know that's compelling fluoride is there there are some effect in there's some benefits there where i would assume yes there is some benefit to fluoride if we put it on topically that's a little bit like suntan lotion put it on the outside of the body and it's good but you don't eat the same thing with fluoride putting some on the outside of the tooth can benefit a person but swallowing it doesn't show any benefit now how does how does florida actually then if it is just a brief ok that's very good it's supposed to harden the surface of the tooth and there's been a lot of research showing how the anomalous surface and even some of the den becomes harder but that brings in the problem also it may make the tooth a little bit harder but it also makes it more brittle so we have more fractured teeth and we have to have more crowns root canals extractions implants those kind of dental things go up those treatments and it's also causes cosmetic damage there's nothing else that causes dental fluorosis other than fluoride skeletal fluorosis the same is fluoride excess of amounts of floor it can cause bone and tooth damage we see that damage in the teeth as they're developing especially for children if a person has had a child said too much for it as the teeth are developing then we have problems that's one of the reasons why the american dental association and the center for disease control has said infants should not have formula made with seattle water flora dated water interest and they're protecting infants what about adult human brittle teeth which are basically calcium or their teeth are like bones yes so i was very high in calluses our bones are probably subject floros good studies out of utah and many other places where there's an increase in fractured bones back hip those kinds of things and people who have had fluoride in their water while they've been growing up and why they've been living so it increases it in an elderly person who has a broken hip or a broken back they have about six months on average of life expectancy after they've broken a bone so because very serious and life threatening or are there other health risk related to you know let's let's look at the infants a little bit more because that's a that's real close to my heart here we in seattle flora date all people that's how you get your water when you go to the restaurant when you get your foods and you process your food your soups your juices what we do is we have florida in our water but fluoride in water is two hundred fifty times more concentrated th mother's milk and so if you get that fluoride in your formula you're going to get the white spots on the teeth the dental fluorosis and over the last ten years we've seen a eighty five percent increase in dental fluorosis in children up to one out of three children now have dental floss is a sign of too much fluoride it's a good example as the white spots on the white spots they can be brown spots also now the edge of those front teeth started to develop at about birth so this would be the white spots there would be primarily developed during the first year of life and then it'll get more white spots if there's too much floyd later on the american academy of pediatrics in one nine hundred ninety eight said that we should that infants and children up to the age of three years of age should not have more than one glass of florida dated water what do you tell a child who's thirsty and they've been running around all day and had their super their juice or whatever it is that they have with there's seattle water well johnny just can't drink anymore water today because you've had your glass of water this is that had your parts per million by the way when how many really well that is up for debate i'm for it is very common and florida in the water that we have in seattle is one part per million and candidates point six for those places that florida new zealand and australia are one purple moon but most other countries in the world don't florida they don't feel like it's a good place to put it because partly it's not really fluoride it's a it's an industrial waste byproduct that industrial waste byproduct has many other chemicals in it such as the lead and arsenic and cadmium and brilliant and radium and radio nucleotides all these different things are in the chemical as an industrial grade waste product you're seeing because we had fluoride we're also adding all of these industrial grade coal contaminants exactly i was listening to television last night on from a limpia and there was the american the washington medical  association former pediatrics present and he was saying no level of lead can be considered safe and yet we don't give people a choice we put it in their water without their choice and we're putting lead in there so what we've done in research is to go and draw blood out of people children adults and we can see that those people in florida aided areas have more lead in their blood this is measured this is known you know it christmas time we're pulling toys off the shelf because they had lead in them and the paint from china these toys well nobody knows whether that lead was actually getting into the children but here the only mass medicated drug is fluoride and it includes lead that we're putting into our children our lives and there's no safe level of lead you know i read something preparing for for top of clay and it was interesting that when you cook piers you don't realize africa we boiled our water to make it safe you can't boil seattle water to get the floor i doubt make it safe that's terrible you have to use special reverse osmosis filters or you have to buy bottled water  in those types of things you're right most of it goes on the lawn and washing the car and all those types years back into the pros and those types of things and so that even some industries have to use filtration to take it out because i prices in some places for it is too high but that's naturally occurring and naturally occurring fluoride is different because it's usually found in high mineral content water so there's a lot of calcium in the water and the floor and the calcium are tied up and they don't affect the humans as much as the hydro flow salissa gases which we put into the water which doesn't dissolve fully at first and it tends to go right to the end user well that's a mouthful hydro s they do sodium fluoride there's different ones is which is a little better product but when we use here is not very good what is the difference between fluoride fluorine and how reactive visit chemically i'm not a camera state used to take chemistry and so i can't give you all the details of it but fluoride flooring is a is at the top of the periodic table very reactive very important element for making in dental products and in medical products and but we're using it more and more in many different sources for instance recently the amount of past aside residue of fluoride that's allowed on foods and while they're in the in the field growing has gone up up to twenty five times more fluoride is allowed as a residue on the foods then after it's harvested you have post harvest imogen's by dowie grow chemical and they call it proof human to make it kind of sound good its  with the foods so that the food lasts longer shelf life and we don't lose so much to the bugs and mold and those types of things so the amount of florid we're getting now compared to what we're getting back in the fifty's when they did some of this research we're going far more florid now and and those areas do serve a purpose they are important but at what point do we say the dosage for each person is too high have there ever been any documented illnesses other than fluorosis or deaths from fluoride in our drinking water or in our consumption i have patients that come in to me whose physicians a said to them are dermatologist don't use floor dated toothpaste because it's giving you the rational on your lips don't use florida in bathing there are people who who have a problem just with a florid coming under their skin from taking baths and they'll govt traveling around from one city or the next not know if there's lori there when they develop a rational call up the water district and yep sure enough they got to florida in this district whereas in the next city they don't have a problem and they call them up they say no there's no floridian so there are some people  chemically sensitive especially children such as down's children and some of these chemically sensitive people one of the one of the big areas is the national research council who listed a whole bunch of diseases patient when you have problems with the thyroid you have increased obesity we have a problem with obesity in the united states huge increase diabetes one out of three children born after two thousand are expected to get diabetes are huge problems there but it also affects the mind in the brain know what sets us apart from animals is our mind we can think and i just did a comparison of ranking the states in the united states from the least florida and the most florida did states have more than double the mental retardation of the lowest floridian now that translates into school districts special education increased violence which we see in more florida dairies there's all kinds of problems when you get somebody frustrated because their mind isn't working well their i q is gone down you mentioned earlier that people are advised by their physicians perhaps if they're hypersensitive the fluoride to avoid it now let's go into that a little bit sure what can i get to space without fluoride absolutely there are quite a few companies that are pertinent that are making toothpaste that don't have a florida in it and tom's of maine owned by procter and gamble they just purchased them tom's of maine has some but you have to read the label most health food stores have someone that is kind of has a cute name is kiss my face and the company out of italy and all there is all over mara and that is a product that's good birds is another one but you know if a person is short on money baking soda works just fine and great great gramma use that a lot and it works very well now we see in this slide that the recommended amount of toothpaste is that little sliver on the end how many people this loses some pictures of the toothpaste tube read your toothpaste tube and it says drug facts we know that it's a drug if i wanted to give it to you i'd have to write a prescription for you and so we know it's a drug it's not you can't buy it over the counter for swallowing well one thing drug in a says only use a piece size amount this is flexible language by the f d a that's required so you're looking at don't swallow it and if you swallow it contact the poison control cent that's a piece size amount very tiny the piece size amount is the same amount of floor and point two five milligrams as one glass of florida a good water now how can they force us to drink  florida water and then and the same amount the same dosage the same concentration in a in industrial waste product that has lots of contaminants as want in seattle water as then saying don't swallow a piece sized amount of toothpaste so it's just not necessary to be doing it doesn't reduce tooth decay if we swallow it it causes a lot of damage to the thyroid to the end you can system and other things there are many government agencies that have great reservations about the safety of it and the use of it and nobody's checking to see for getting too much nobody's following through with it you you mentioned i think  oh but we don't have anything do with water because that's not a it's not a food it's a water and so the f d a says they're not responsible leader says they're not responsible in fact no one says they're responsible except the washington state department of health and they refused to talk to scientists about this it's a really a shame that they refused to even meet with talk with scientists other than allowing their lawyers to speak with it so that they know about the problems of increased mental retardation they know that there's increased diabetes they know that there's increases in obesity they know that there are many increases in heart attacks we have a lot of different diseases that they are fully aware of and they refusing to talk about it how about bottled water as a refuge for me when i go to bottled water you know the klavier fluoride i wish we didn't have to use bottled water because all those bottles create a huge pollution problem but yes your bottle of water is safer from a klein flooring standpoint now my grandma used to take care her glass of water from the that was chlorinated and she'd take a bottle of it and put it on the counter at night and let the chlorine come off we can get it off easily week of the corn but the flooring doesn't come off the floor i'd that's put in there so this is a problem and yes i do recommend for infants to use bottled water the problem is some bottled water has fluoride in it and it's they don't always say it but you're pretty good most of the water sold in most of the grocery stores that are most common don't have florida in its kind of the very expensive brands that are a waste product of aluminum and the phosphate fertilizer industry as something that would be very expensive for them to handle to meet the e p a disposal requirements and voila they did a big marketing job and now we have an in our drinking water can you comment on that well you know what they've come up with is the solution to pollution is dilution yeah that's a sad commentary but they have all this tons and tons they sell two hundred thousand tons of hydra flow salissa gases and when you translate that into if they were to call a hazardous waste company to dispose of it at about four or five thousand dollars per ton you can come up with some big money that they're saving by selling it rather than paying to have it disposed of so there's some money there but i would say that the biggest problem is the same problem i had for twenty five years i just filled to look at the science i wasn't motivated to look at it i assumed that my dental association my health department were telling me good solid strong evidence and that's was just not true do you think that a conscientious researcher would be funded or even florida we get are from ford from japan usually they send their waste product over here to dispose of it here interesting but as far as would a person keep their job there have been people who have been fired their pin people who resigned over this issue and so it does become very sticky fortunately some of the university professors are tenured and though they have almost lost their jobs it's very difficult to get a tenured professor out and so when they realize and they look at the research and find that it's this hazardous some of them are speaking out you know we're just about out of time and i would like i would like you to address very briefly thirty seconds or so what do you want people to do i know you  cautionary principle write number one don't drink fluoridation water number two don't swallow your toothpaste that's going to really get you down on the floor and intake third thing is contact your representative in your senator we're working on trying to get a task force together to create a task force that can look at the science of this scientists from both sides of the issues that we can study it look at it and come up with some guidance for the department of health and for community members and people so we don't have as much florida or at least it's reviewed because in thirty five years it hasn't been reviewed so avoid flooring i know there's a fluoride alert or gives or another place you like dot com smiles plural of bellevue contact me and i'll stay put you on to some more e mail and websites that will talk about fluoride and you're going to continue until you lobby fluoride out of our drinking water absolutely we're going to get it out there's no