Is Fluoride dumbing down our Children? Science says…. Yes

The Great Fluoride Debate

There’s an interesting debate going on in the United States about the risks and benefits of adding fluoride to the public water system. There’s a lot of hysteria on both sides, but recent studies sort of shocked me, so I thought I’d share it. I had always believed fluoridation of water was a net benefit but was interested to have another look when my own dentist told me he thought it was a bad idea.

History of Fluoridation

Let’s start with how we got here. Why put fluoride into the water system? In 1901, a dentist named Frederick McKay moved to Colorado Springs to start his dental practice. He was astounded to see that 90% of local children had this ugly brown staining on their teeth, but nobody had reported this in the dental literature and nobody knew what caused the so-called Colorado Brown Stain. Interestingly, the teeth were unsightly, but very resistant to cavities.

McKay thought perhaps the culprit was the water supply. In 1923, stains began to appear in Oakley, Idaho where a new pipeline had recently been built. On McKay’s advice, the town changed their water source to another spring and the mottling disappeared. The culprit was high natural levels of fluoride in the water.

In 1931, Dr. H. Trendley Dean, head of the Dental Hygiene Unit at the National Institute for Health (NIH), determined that lower levels of fluoride in the water did not cause…