Is Fluoride Safe? The Fluoride Debate

You’ve heard it. The fluoride debate – is fluoride safe?

“Don’t use it!”

“It protects your teeth from cavities!”

“It’s neurotoxic”

“It keeps your bones strong.”

When I started Nuvitru, I wanted to hit some of these nutrition/health controversies straight on. I wanted to come from an unbiased standpoint and really research and bring to light on what the evidence says. So, I’m here today bringing you the down-low on fluoride and if it’s something you should be worried about or shouldn’t be worried about.

Fluoride & The Studies

Fluoride is a mineral that is promoted to reduce tooth decay and help with osteoporosis by stimulating new bone growth. It can be found in United States water, soil, hygiene products, plants, and animals. There are many people that say dental cavities are reduced in areas that fluoridate water, but there was also 60 percent reduction in cavities in non-fluoridated communities as well. That was done in a study in the Journal of American Dental Association.

In a BMC Public Health study, they showed that a high sugar diet brought on the increase of cavities, even though people lived in an area of high fluoridation.

 Adults aged 65 years and older living in water fluoridated areas where high proportions of people used fluoridated toothpastes, had nearly half of all tooth surfaces affected by caries.

I could’ve told you that diet impacts your dental health way more than fluoride influence. There is very little evidence that fluoride actually helps with reducing the amount of cavities in developed countries. Other developed countries, like in Europe, don’t have fluoridated water and they have a reduction in cavities too.

Conventional dentistry always talks about brushing, flossing, and using fluoride, but I’ve never heard a dentist tell me about diet changes and how it can help you reduce cavities (which I know from school) and about how environmental factors, such as BPA in plastic, can weaken your enamel.  I think we are focusing too much on things like fluoride that isn’t even proven 100% to help reduce cavities. Countries that don’t brush their teeth, but eat a real food diet away from developed countries with processed junk everywhere have perfect teeth with no cavities. Makes you wonder doesn’t it?

Fluoride is also known to affect the nervous system and building up overtime to affect different body tissues. Like many other dangerous ingredients in food and other aspects of health, it can be YEARS before any health issues come up. Fluoride can promote oxidative stress in the body, especially in the nervous system and can be considered a pro-inflammatory. 

In China, they have been investigating this topic for 20 years and found that children that lived in fluoridated communities had a lower IQ versus children who live in non-fluoridated areas or areas that only used a little bit of fluoridation. In Mexico, they did a similar study that had the same results.

In rats, they showed that fluoride can actually impact fertility and the male’s testes by decreasing the sperm. The increased oxidative stress that I mentioned above can trigger sperm apoptosis (cell death).

In a fish study, fluoride also showed effects on the thyroid and hormones,

Fluoride significantly affects thyroid endocrine system by changing the microtrastructure of thyroid, altering thyroid hormone levels and endocrine-related gene expressions in male zebrafish.

As you can see, fluoride is affecting many different organ systems. Some studies are done on humans. Some on animals. It’s the fact that internal use of fluoride, which isn’t even an essential nutrient, shows harm to us and the ecosystem around us.

My Thoughts

From the studies that I’ve shown today, I don’t think fluoridation in water is needed. I believe there is just too much consumption of fluoride between all the different products on the market, fluoridated water used in food products, regular water we use at home, soil, etc. It’s becoming too much into our body, which can build up over time and create toxic effects.

If you are looking to take out the fluoride in your water, look into a reverse osmosis water filter. Most water purification systems DO NOT remove fluoride, which I can tell you it’s so easy to fall for some of the “best” water filters and they remove the majority of other crap in water, but doesn’t remove fluoride.

When we bought a very expensive water filter, e-Spring, I thought it was the best one for our family until I realized it didn’t remove fluoride. Total waste of money because fluoride was something that I wanted to minimize ingesting.

So, don’t worry! I’ve been there – it’s hard to navigate through all the different water purification products out there. We are purchasing our first reverse osmosis water filter this week!

Do you have a reverse osmosis filter?