Fluoride

This is going to read like a conspiracy theory, and that’s fine, because half the things we now treat as basic public health were conspiracy theories thirty years ago. Lead in gasoline was a conspiracy theory. PFAS contaminating the entire global water supply was a conspiracy theory. Big Sugar paying Harvard scientists to blame fat for heart disease was a conspiracy theory. Asbestos being safe was the official position of the asbestos industry, and so was the official position of the regulators they paid for. The pattern repeats. The pattern is the data. Eventually the conspiracy theory becomes the EPA fact sheet, and the people who were right twenty years early get a quiet apology nobody reads.

So let us start with fluoride, and then let us widen out to the rest of the chemicals you and your children are bathing in, eating, and breathing — none of which we evolved with, and most of which we are pretending are fine because the alternative is admitting we have made an enormous, civilizationally embarrassing mistake.

Fluoride is industrial waste

The fluoride going into your municipal water supply is not pharmaceutical-grade sodium fluoride. It is hydrofluorosilicic acid, a byproduct of phosphate fertilizer manufacturing — specifically, it is what the smokestack scrubbers catch when they prevent the surrounding farmland from being killed by the fluoride emissions the EPA otherwise classifies as hazardous waste. That liquid, which cannot legally be dumped into a river, is instead trucked to your municipal water treatment plant and dripped into the drinking water of your children. The phosphate industry sells it to your city. Your city pays for the privilege of disposing of an industrial waste stream through your kidneys.

The original American push to fluoridate municipal water in the late 1940s and early 1950s was partly an honest dental study and largely a coordinated public-relations campaign by industries — aluminum (Alcoa), atomic weapons (the Manhattan Project produced enormous fluoride emissions and was being sued by farmers downwind), and fertilizer — that needed fluoride to be perceived as benign rather than as the lawsuit they were holding. The campaign worked. A nation was convinced. Two generations of children were medicated through the tap, without consent, at uncontrolled doses dependent on how much water each child happened to drink.

What the actual science says

In 2015, a Cochrane review — which is the gold standard of medical meta-analysis, not a fringe blog — looked at the body of evidence for water fluoridation reducing tooth decay in modern populations. They found that almost all the supportive studies were conducted before 1975, before fluoride toothpaste was widespread, and that the modern evidence base was thin. Translated into English: we have been telling ourselves that water fluoridation works because of studies that were obsolete by the time they were cited.

In 2024 the National Toxicology Program — the federal body that, despite its flaws, is supposed to evaluate this kind of question — concluded with moderate confidence that fluoride exposure above 1.5 mg/L is associated with reduced IQ in children. This was, of course, a finding the agency tried to suppress for years before being forced to release it. A federal judge then ordered the EPA to take action. The EPA, of course, has done as little as it can get away with.

Meanwhile, fluoride accumulates in the human pineal gland, which calcifies under chronic exposure. The pineal regulates your circadian rhythm. Fluoride disrupts thyroid function at doses below what your municipal water already provides. It causes dental fluorosis — those white streaks and brown spots on children’s permanent teeth, visible on roughly forty percent of American adolescents per the CDC’s own data — and dental fluorosis is the visible sign of skeletal fluorosis happening invisibly in the rest of the body. The toothpaste tube tells you to call Poison Control if a child swallows a strip larger than a pea, and we drip the same molecule into the same water at the same plant that filters out everything else.

Most of continental Europe does not fluoridate its water. Their dental outcomes are equal or better than ours. The case for fluoridation, on examination, falls apart. The case against it is sitting on the EPA’s own desk, ignored.

The cage is bigger than fluoride

Fluoride is the canary. The cage is everything else, and the cage is what we should actually be talking about.

We are the first generation of humans in the entire history of the species to live, eat, and breathe inside a chemical environment that did not exist when our biology was finalized. Every cell in the human body was tuned, slowly, over hundreds of thousands of generations, to a specific set of inputs — sun, water, air, plants, animals, rocks, dust. None of those inputs included synthetic compounds invented in a lab in the last hundred and twenty years. We are now eating, drinking, and inhaling thousands of them, daily, and we are pretending it has no effect because the alternative is unbearable.

A short, incomplete list of what is in your body that should not be:

Glyphosate. The active ingredient in Roundup. Sprayed on virtually every conventional grain, often as a desiccant in the days before harvest, which means it goes directly into the wheat, the oats, the corn, and everything made from them. The IARC classified it as a probable human carcinogen in 2015. Bayer, which bought Monsanto and the lawsuits with it, has paid out over ten billion dollars in settlements. The chemical is in your urine. It is in the urine of everyone you know. We have not stopped spraying it.

PFAS — the “forever chemicals.” Teflon, Scotchgard, firefighting foam, water-resistant clothing, food packaging, dental floss. They do not break down. They are in the blood of ninety-nine percent of Americans, including newborns, who got them through the umbilical cord. They are linked to cancer, thyroid disease, immune suppression, ulcerative colitis, and infertility. DuPont and 3M knew about the toxicity of PFOA and PFOS for decades and concealed it; the internal documents are now public; the people who concealed it are now retired with full pensions; the chemicals are still on the market under different names with two extra letters in the molecule.

Microplastics. Now found in human placentas, in human brains, in human testicles, in human blood, in arterial plaque. The conservative estimate is that the average adult ingests something on the order of a credit card’s worth of plastic per week. Nobody knows what this is doing to us. Anybody who tells you they know is lying. The honest answer is: we are running the experiment in real time, on every human alive, with no control group.

Phthalates and BPA / BPS. The plasticizers that make plastic flexible or hard, depending on which one. They leach out of every food container, every personal care product, every shower curtain, every receipt printed on thermal paper. They are endocrine disruptors at vanishingly small doses. They lower testosterone in baby boys. They mimic estrogen in adults. They were sold to us as inert.

Heavy metals. Lead in legacy pipes, still flowing into millions of American homes — Flint was not unique, Flint just got famous. Mercury in dental amalgams that off-gas vapor for decades while sitting in your mouth. Aluminum in antiperspirants, applied daily to thin-skinned tissue inches from the brain, and in cookware, and in vaccine adjuvants. Cadmium in cigarette smoke and in agricultural soils. Arsenic in rice grown on land that used to be cotton fields where arsenical pesticides were sprayed for a century.

Atrazine. A herbicide so well-documented to feminize male frogs that the EU banned it in 2003. The US still uses it. It is in the drinking water of an estimated thirty million Americans. Tyrone Hayes, the Berkeley scientist who exposed it, was personally surveilled and harassed by the manufacturer for years, which became part of the public record in a deposition. The chemical is still on shelves.

Industrial fragrances. “Fragrance” on a label is a legally protected trade secret that can contain hundreds of undisclosed chemicals. Most are phthalates, synthetic musks, and petrochemical derivatives. They go into your laundry detergent, your dryer sheets, your air freshener, your shampoo, and your candles. You inhale them all day and through the night. The endocrine system does not care that the bottle is pretty.

Chlorine and chloramine in your tap water. They kill the pathogens, which is good. They also react with organic matter to form trihalomethanes and haloacetic acids, which are carcinogenic, and which you absorb through your skin in the shower at higher rates than by drinking. They also wreck the gut microbiome, which is the immune system of seventy percent of your body.

This list is not complete. It is not close to complete. It is the start of the list.

The pattern

Notice the pattern, because the pattern is the lesson. In every case: an industry produces a chemical, the chemical is profitable, the chemical turns out to be harmful, the industry funds the science that says it is fine, the regulators (staffed by industry alumni and headed for industry jobs after they leave government) accept the funded science, and the public absorbs the cost in their bodies for thirty to fifty years before the lawsuits make it expensive enough to stop. Then a new chemical, structurally similar, takes over the market, and the cycle restarts. Lead, asbestos, DDT, tobacco, leaded gasoline, BPA, PFOA — every single one ran this script. The current chemicals are running it now. The next ones are in the pipeline.

The agencies will not save you. The FDA, the EPA, the CDC, and the USDA were all originally meant to. They have all, to varying degrees, been captured by the industries they were built to regulate, through the well-documented revolving door, through industry funding of their advisory committees, and through the simple fact that the technical expertise needed to evaluate a chemical lives mostly inside the company that makes it. This is not a controversial claim. It is a structural fact, repeatedly described by the agencies’ own former officials. The institutions are not on your side. They are not the enemy in a cinematic sense, either; they are simply not the protectors they were marketed as.

What this has to do with MS

For someone with multiple sclerosis, this entire essay is twice as urgent. MS is, in part, a disease of inflammation, of demyelination, of a nervous system that has lost the ability to keep the immune system from attacking its own wiring. Every chemical above is, in some way, pro-inflammatory or directly neurotoxic. Glyphosate disrupts the gut microbiome and the gut-brain axis. PFAS suppress the immune system in unpredictable ways. Heavy metals — particularly mercury and aluminum — cross the blood-brain barrier and accumulate in neural tissue. Endocrine disruptors derange the hormonal environment that the nervous system depends on for repair. Fluoride accumulates in the central nervous system and disrupts the thyroid that the central nervous system depends on. We are giving an MS body more work than any nervous system was ever designed to handle, and then telling the patient to take a pill to feel better.

We have done a lot of work in our house to remove this load, because every gram we remove is a gram the body does not have to defend against, and every gram of defense saved is a gram of recovery available.

You won’t get to zero. The chemicals are in the rain. The chemicals are in the soil. The chemicals are in the placenta of every pregnancy in the developed world. Zero is not the goal. Less is the goal.

Order of operations:

Filter your water. A good carbon block filter removes most chlorine, chloramine, and many pesticides. A reverse osmosis system removes fluoride and most of the rest. Tap water in this country is not safe in the way you have been told it is.

Buy organic for the foods you eat the most of. You do not need to buy everything organic. The Environmental Working Group’s “Dirty Dozen” list is a reasonable starting point. Berries, leafy greens, apples, grapes — the thin-skinned, heavy-spray crops — are where the dose is highest.

Stop cooking in non-stick pans. Cast iron, stainless steel, glass, and ceramic. PFAS coatings shed into your food at every temperature, and the fumes off an overheated non-stick pan will kill a parakeet.

Stop using fragranced products. Switch to fragrance-free detergent, fragrance-free soap, fragrance-free everything. Throw out the candles and the air fresheners. Open the windows.

Replace plastic food storage with glass and stainless steel. Especially anything that gets heated. Microwaving food in plastic is, almost literally, asking the plastic to migrate into the food. Which it does. Which you then eat.

Choose toothpaste without fluoride if you want to opt out at the household level. Several good options exist. The teeth do not need municipal medication.

Push for non-fluoridated water in your municipality. Many cities have already stopped, especially in the last two years as the science has come out from under the consensus. Yours can too. Show up to the meeting. Bring the NTP report.

None of this is purity culture. None of this is fear. It’s the basic recognition that the body didn’t evolve under these conditions, that the body is doing its best, and that the kindest thing you can do for it is to stop adding new poisons faster than it can clear the old ones.

The institutions that were supposed to protect you are not. You are. Act like it.