Water

In This Chapter:

Disease or dehydration?
Acid/alkaline
Tap water
Chlorine
Fluoridation
Filters

Some years before he was cryogenically preserved, Walt Disney made an educational animated movie with Bell Science Labs called Hemo the Magnificent. It wasn't shown at movie theaters; it appeared in schools. Hemo the Magnificent was the story of human blood, a science film for kids. It was definitely ahead of its time and today would probably be considered adult level, things being what they are, dumbing us down and all.

At the beginning of the film the question is asked - What substance on earth does human blood most resemble? We are surprised at the answer: sea water. And then the story is told about how all life evolved from the ocean, and then they show primitive life forms like one-celled creatures, up to the jellyfish, who have sort of a primitive in-and-out flushing as a precursor of a circulatory system, then gradually getting into more complex forms who began to have a primitive heart and some blood vessels. And all this evolves to the mammalian circulatory system.

Aeons later, our blood is still over 90% water - though not salt water, of course. Even though it's the other 10% that makes us human and has taken ages to evolve, we are still an H2O unit. I think it was Tom Robbins who said

"Humans were invented by water as a means of transporting itself from place to place"

OK.

THE IMPORTANCE OF WATER

Without food, most humans will die in a month, if they have water. Without water, 10 days is about it. Water makes up 75% of the body, 90% of the blood, and 85% of the brain.

An odd little book was published in 1994 that made quite a stir: The Body's Many Cries for Water, by an MD named Batmanghelidj. A claim is made by this doctor that the cause of most diseases is simply dehydration. Dr. B provides the reasoning as well as dozens of case studies to support the cure of a variety of illnesses by simply drinking between two and three liters of water per day.

Doubting such a theory because of its overwhelming simplicity, the reader is shown that physiologically, it makes perfect sense. As Dr B points out, dry mouth is a late sign of thirst. Saliva is produced even in chronic dehydration, because it is a digestive enzyme. Thirst, or the need for water on the cellular level is something entirely different. Chronic dehydration brings its own symptoms, which we have been conditioned to cover up, either with food or with drugs. Here are a few examples of dehydration signals:

SYMPTOM --- USUAL REMEDY

• peptic ulcer
• antacids
• craving sweets
• sugar
• depression
• antidepressant drugs
• allergies
• antihistamines

Dr B reports his successful treatment of 3000 peptic ulcer patients using water alone. Anecdotal? He explains how ulcer pain is really a thirst signal. It actually makes sense: if the intestine is too dehydrated to adequately refresh its mucus lining every time after the acidic products of digestion have passed by, the lining will become irritated and painful. The intestine is not protected from digestive acid like the stomach is. Antacids will only temporarily cover up the problem. Rehydrating the tract will enable to intestine to form adequate mucous lining, thus reducing acid irritation. (p31)

Similarly with depression, allergies, asthma, arthritis, diabetes, and addiction to sweets, Dr. Batmanghelidj shows how balancing the extracellular fluids and lowering the concentration of the blood to a more normal dilution can bring consistent resolution to these and many other illnesses.

It's almost too simple. But Dr. B takes the reader through the physiology of each illness. His premise is hard to deny.

Obviously such an approach is not going to gain the favor of the drug cartels; here's a guy telling people they don't need heart medication and diuretics and insulin and Prozac and Viagra and pain drugs any more. All they really need is two liters of water per day. What if he's right and people find out about it? The drug business is the foundation our $1.5 trillion medical budget. See the dangers?

So of course the good doctor ran into some formidable stone walls when he tried to get attention and funding from the AMA and other mainstream institutions for researching his theories. He was politely ignored. But a lot of people are buying the book.

DIURETICS? TRY WATER!

Most people don't seem to know the word diuretic; but they know what a blood thinner is.

Batmanghelidj's views on treating high blood pressure with diuretics can't really be argued. He explains that the whole mainstream theory is based on a false premise: doctors say Oh, you have high blood pressure? Too much blood, too much fluid in the body. Take these drugs to make you get rid of water, thin out the blood a little. That'll take the strain off your heart so it won't have to work so hard.

Amazingly most people believe this appalling distortion of physiological reality and take their pills like good little patients. Then they have their heart attacks on schedule and go in for bypass, like good little lemmings, keeping heart disease as the #1 killer of Americans for the past three decades.

Batmanghelidj points out the obvious: diuretics increase dehydration. They make you lose more water. But the original cause of the high blood pressure in the first place was loss of fluids. The less fluids, the more the blood vessels close up. Obviously the blood vessels can't leave room for gas when blood volume is decreased. So the blood vessels naturally constrict, or close up, with less blood volume. The constriction is what causes high blood pressure - it's harder to push water through a thin garden hose than a thick one.

Also the less fluids, the more concentrated the blood becomes. And this triggers the blood vessels to close down a little more, in order to prevent what? Water loss.

By adding more water to the system, the heart won't be so desperate to hang onto both sodium and water. Increased blood volume, and also making the blood more dilute, will relax the vessels and open them up wider. Such a simple method consistently lowers blood pressure, on a long-term basis.

The amazing thing is not that this is so absurdly simple; it's that the people we entrust our health to could possibly miss something as fundamental as hydration. What about the complicated stuff?

Either Dr. Batmanghelidj is right or the HMO doctors selling Lopressor and Cardizem are right. Can't be both.

EVEN GOOD CHOLESTEROL CAN BE BAD IF THE BODY'S DEHYDRATED

We know that cholesterol has many important jobs. It is necessary for making hormones, insulation for nerves, and the membranes of all our cells. But in a condition of chronic dehydration, water is constantly being pulled out of our cells, for the body's many operations. To protect the cells from losing too much water, cholesterol is poured between the cracks of the cells, as a sort of protective sealant between cell membranes. (Batmanghieldj, p 83) Many people who eat a lot of eggs can still have normal blood cholesterol, as long as they always have plenty of water. The body only feels the need to seal off the cell membranes with cholesterol if there's a reason to conserve water. Thus high cholesterol. In the hydrated body, there's no excess cholesterol production.

THIRST QUENCHERS

When we're thirsty, we don't drink water. We drink coffee and Coke and diet Dr. Pepper and ice tea and beer and milk and anything else we've been conditioned to buy. And we tell ourselves we don't need to drink water because all these beverages have water in them. Right?

Wrong. It's a long story, but the punchline is this: all these drinks are actually diuretics - they make the cells and the body lose water. The sugar and caffeine in those drinks pull water out of the cells in order to maintain the delicate pH and electrolyte balance in the blood. Result: cell dehydration. Cell dehydration is the #1 cause of aging. Also a big contributor to degenerative diseases, like arthritis, hypertension, and diabetes.

One way to tell if you're dehydrated is to check the color of the urine. If it's dark all the time, you're probably dehydrated. It's a good bet that one of the above drinks is your beverage of choice.

Only one solution:

TWO LITERS A DAY

It's no picnic. Unless you already have this custom, drinking two liters of water a day takes effort. That's a least eight large glassesful. Every day. It takes planning and discipline. But it's cheap and harmless, and if you have any health problem whatsoever, including premature crowsfeet, you owe it to yourself to give this self-evident shotgun approach a try. In the unlikely event that it "doesn't work' after two months, something else needs to be tweaked. Probably in the dairy or sugar category. But read some of the testimonials in Dr B's book, and you'll likely find people with much more serious problems than yours who totally recovered. Many were on multiple medications.

I know - you're thinking you'll be spending your life in the bathroom if you drink 2 liters a day, right? Funny thing is, the bladder is a muscular organ. Like any other muscle, it weakens with inactivity and strengthens with use. The more water you drink, the more the strength and capacity of the bladder will increase. So very soon you won't have to make extra trips to the bathroom, even though you'll be drinking more water.

Think of all the people who dehydrate themselves just because they wish to avoid the bathroom. Where are our priorities? Where is our education? Water is cell life.

Two liters is the intake necessary to maintain normal good health. If you want to get into anti-aging applications, intake goes up to THREE liters. Obviously this is something you'd have to work up to. But for maximum hydration of skin cells, three is the number.

THE pH OF BLOOD

Everyone has a general idea of pH: acidic means stuff like vinegar, and Coke, battery acid, and citrus. Basic, or alkaline, means stuff like soap, and milk, and bran.

Acid/base - that's a scale we call pH. The scale goes from 1 to 14. It's a log scale: that means that pH 6 is 10x more acid than pH 7. The lower the number, the more acid; the higher the number, the more basic:

All living substances have a pH, and also an optimum range of pH. Any standard physiology text, like Guyton's for example, will state that the range of blood pH is 7.3 - 7.45 for human life. More acidic than 7.3, we die. More basic than 7.45, we die.

Here's an example to show how inventive the body is at protecting itself. If you pour a glass of Coke into 10 gallons of water, the pH will drop from 7.8 to 4.6 immediately. (Whang, p 22) Now, we have way less than half that much blood: only 5 liters. So what prevents one glass of Coke from killing us by lowering our blood pH below the 7.3 limit? A little trick the body evolved over millions of years: buffering. Buffering is how the body changes the acidic foods we eat in order to keep the blood pH always about the same. Two main kinds of buffering, and you can look them up the next time you decide to get a medical degree. (Guyton, p 387)

For now, the point here is that this constant burden we place on the body to keep buffering all these Cokes, Johnnie Walker Black, burgers, tacos, and white sugar treats - uses up the body's stores of minerals, enzymes, and vitamins. Actually, it wastes them, thereby making the person age faster. Those stores were supposed to be used for normal life functions, not for ridding the body of manmade indigestible chemicals mistakenly called food.

Buffering also uses up free oxygen and breaks down cells and tissues by means of oxidation. And now we're talking about free radicals again. And aging.

When we drink water, we're taking some of the stress off the body by helping to make the blood more basic (higher number). The pH of tap water is about 8.4, and of bottled water about 7.8 or so. The more we can keep the blood closer to the higher number, the 7.45, the slower we age. Turns out there is a big difference between blood that is pH 7.3 and blood that is pH 7.45. The higher number blood has 64% more free oxygen than the lower number (Whang, p 21). That's a lot. Over the years, such a difference in daily stress definitely adds up.

Reducing the amount of buffering we require the body to do is another big reason for drinking a ton of water every day.

OK, the importance of water is pretty obvious. The next question is - does it make any difference what kind of water we drink? Tap water, spring water, bottled water, filtered water, distilled water, mineral water, what?

TAP WATER

City water, municipal water, tap water - no argument that one of the main reasons for the eradication of infectious diseases, as we saw in the Vaccinations chapter, was a controlled water supply. After all those centuries, it finally dawned on people that they wouldn't die quite so fast if the water they drank could be uncontaminated with sewage.

So in the 1800s, the hallmark of the civilized city, both in Europe and in America, was a municipal water supply and a sewage system. This one development was the single biggest health advancement in history.

Then politics saw an angle. What if we could convince the people that industrial wastes needed to be added to the water in order to make it "safe"? To the tune of billions of dollars per year? The money would change hands between the local governments and the chemical industry, not to mention state and federal government who would need to pass laws to keep the show on the road.

First contestant:

HOW ABOUT CHLORINE?

Chloride as it exists in nature is an element, a raw mineral that is actually an essential mineral in human nutrition, as we saw in the Minerals chapter. We evolved from the salt water of the ocean, which has natural sodium chloride.

Industrial chlorine, by contrast, is another thing altogether. Industrial chlorine is not a natural compound. It must be manufactured, by passing an electric current through regular salt (sodium chloride) The result is a toxic gas which can then be complexed to form many industrial products. Examples are medicines, plastics, solvents, sealants, bleach, computer chips, paints, and disinfectants. (Chlorophiles)

From here on out, "chlorine' means the industrial type.

Chlorine gas was a weapon used in WWI. This powerful neurotoxin is so poisonous that it was outlawed by international war codes. Chlorine gas cannot be screened out by our lungs - it goes in faster than oxygen, and is immediately absorbed into the bloodstream when it is inhaled. If the concentration is adequate, death is instantaneous.

Europeans remember all this - that's where WWI happened. Swimming pools in most of Europe are not chlorinated. When European athletes come to the U.S. to compete in swimming events, they have forfeited events rather than swim in a chlorinated pool.

The problem is that chlorine gas is formed where chlorinated water comes in contact with air. That's why your nose burns when your put your face close to the surface of a chlorinated pool. Same thing happens with tap water, although to a lesser degree.

WHY IS CHLORINE IN OUR WATER?

Chlorine has been used in the U.S. as a treatment for water purification for most of the past century.

When added to our water supply, chlorine complexes with free contaminants like iron, manganese, and hydrogen sulfide. Any chlorine left over can kill most bacterials and microorganisms. Chlorine was definitely responsible for a radical drop in cases of typhoid early in the century. (Water Review) Same with cholera and amoebic dysentery. (Rathburn)

Cryptosporidium and Giardia are two biologicals resistant to chlorine because they form protective cysts. But most other living microbes in the water supply are killed by adding chlorine. Now obviously we don't want microbugs in our drinking water, so it seems chlorine has some benefit. The problem comes in with:

- the amounts of chlorine added
- carcinogenic chlorine by-products (organochlorines)

Chemicals are measured in water in units called PPM, or parts per million. The standard amount of chlorine sufficient to kill biologicals is 0.5 PPM, as agreed by most scientists. This is the recommended dose for municipal water supplies. The problem arises when scientists don't have control of the input. Usually it's the local water guy. And this guy is all over the place as far as consistent levels are concerned. Some cities have been found to have levels as high as 50 PPM.

The second problem is by-products. Chlorine has an annoying habit of reacting with hydrocarbons (organic matter) to form little devils like trihalomethanes - THMs. Definitely carcinogenic ( Simmon), THM levels have been set by the EPA as not to exceed 80 PPB. That's billion, son. But that figure is really just a guess. Nobody really knows for sure how much THM is necessary to be taken in with daily tap water in order to eventually cause a single cell to mutate. All we know for sure is that some amount of THM can cause cancer.

Predictably written at the moron level, 99% of websites about chlorine present it as a safe but necessary evil. They always say that it's an economic necessity and that the risk of cancer is dwarfed by the importance of disinfecting the nation's drinking water, etc.

But other people aren't so sure. When you search the word "organochlorines" a whole different angle emerges.

ORGANOCHLORINES

For the past century, industry has benefited from the weird reaction between chlorine and organic matter. So far about 11,000 different organochlorines have been created by the chemical industry. Some of them have great industrial value because they are so stable. They degrade very slowly. One obvious example is PVC pipe, which has revolutionized the plumbing industry in the past 15 years. Plastic pipes - easier to work with than soldering all that old copper stuff. PVC plastic is the single biggest application of industrial chlorine products, accounting for about 50% of the total. (How Chlorine Chemicals Are Made). Really stable.

But it is precisely the idea of stability that makes chlorine by-products so dangerous. Want to learn a new word? Here it is: bioaccumulative. When these plastics do degrade, the products of that breakdown last even longer - for decades. That means cumulative buildup in fatty tissues of living things that are exposed to the same water or air. In the cells, this can mean trouble:

• genetic mutation
• hormone disruption
• birth defects
• infertility
• low sperm counts
• cancer
• neurological damage

- Fackelman, p. 142

Bioaccumulativemeans that these chlorine by-products keep going through the food chain time after time. The individual living carrier species die, but the chemicals persist unchanged, decade after decade. The result is that the levels of PCBs and dioxins found in meat and fish can today be millions of times greater than the amounts found in nature. (Chlorine Crisis)

Slow breakdown of PVC plumbing, year after year, is one big stand-alone reason why it's bad to drink tap water, irrespective of the quality of the water itself. At least copper was an essential trace mineral nutrient for humans.

For extra fun, organochlorines mimic estrogen, and are therefore included in the xenoestrogens we saw in the HRT chapter (www.thedoctorwithin.com). Refer to it for a discussion of reproductive and hormonal chaos caused by chemical pollution.

Bleaching paper is another big market for chlorine. America uses a lot of paper, most of it white. Chlorine is the most popular method of bleaching. Problem is, 300 different organochlorines are the result. Guess how much of them gets dumped into lakes, rivers, and oceans of the world each year. Go ahead, guess. 4 million tons!
(Pulp and Paper)

Not to mislead, you know those 300 organochlorines being released into the water? Those are only the ones we have identified! There are literally thousands of others whose actions are totally unknown to us.

Once in the body, organochlorines are protectively encapsulated in fat cells - the site most conducive to long-term storage and accumulation.

ORGANOCHLORINE PESTICIDES

Chlorine bound to carbon is really a good combination for killing pests. Consider the tons of chlordane, DDT, dioxin, and atrazine that have been produced over the past 50 years and dumped into our soil and water, both intentionally and accidentally. No doubt about it: the stuff kills bugs.

Two Israeli researchers documented a 50% drop in breast cancer incidence after a ban on chlorine-based pesticides went into effect. (Richter) They traced it to feed for cows, which then was carried into the milk. The authors explained the dramatic effect in cancer incidence by the idea of an organochlorine as a complete carcinogen.

That means a toxin that is capable of both initiating a tumor and accelerating an established tumor.

That was in Israel. We never had such a ban.

OTHER ORGANOCHLORINES

Also pesticides, epoxy, neoprene, and many other plastics have a chlorine base. Same reason: slow breakdown. Turns out that only about 1% of the chlorine produced is used in drinking water treatment.(Chlorine Crisis)

Remember the defoliant Agent Orange in Vietnam? Dioxin was the killer in Agent Orange. (What Is Dioxin?) Dioxin is a chlorine by-product that is so indestructible and pervasive that it is even found in the bodies of whales and polar bears at the North Pole.

Always remember that "economic necessity' often means a situation favorable to big money. With a production of some 40 million tons per year, since 1990 chlorine is big business. Players like Dow, Bayer, Olin, and Alezo may not be that concerned with the health effects resulting from mass chlorination. (Chlorine Crisis)

CHLORINE AND HEART DISEASE

In 1990, a medical doctor named J.M. Price came out with a book called Cholesterol, Coronaries, and Chlorine. The book is hard to find today, but was promoted and disseminated by Greenpeace. This doctor paints a noteworthy picture of the physiology and the politics of chlorine.

Heart disease has been the number one killer of Americans for decades, and it certainly doesn't look like that's gonna change any time soon. Many patients have had heart problems during a great portion of their lives, with medication and years of diminished physical capacity. But it seems that there are more culprits besides just a high fat diet.

Heart attacks kill hundreds of thousands per year. For about 40%, their very first symptom is death. Such a weakening of the heart didn't happen overnight. It may have taken 20 years to evolve. As the arteries that feed the heart get clogged with cholesterol cement, the same thing is going on everywhere else in the body, including the brain. If a small blood vessel in the brain breaks because it is stuffed with deposits, the person suffers a stroke. Some are mild and hardly noticeable; others are instantly fatal. The point here is, heart attacks and strokes are two versions of the same thing: arterial cholesterol build-up.

What's that got to do with chlorine? Hang in there - it's coming. A hundred years ago the term heart attack didn't even exist. The first clinical description of a heart attack was not made until 1912. (Joseph, p37) In the 1930s and 1940s, the incidence of heart disease increased dramatically, until by the 1980s, it was the #1 killer of Americans. Dr. Joseph makes the point that there is no evidence of atherosclerosis (clogged arteries) prior to the 20th century, even though many cultures favored high fat diets.

Not until chlorination of municipal drinking water became common did heart disease begin to skyrocket. (p51). Actually there is a lag of 10-20 years for the progression of clogging arteries that coincides well enough with increasing chlorination across the U.S. during that same time period.

In both the Korean and the Vietnam Wars, many 20 year-olds undergoing surgery on the battlefields were found to have advanced atherosclerosis (cholesterol-clogged arteries) near the heart. (Joseph, p54) The cause was unmistakable: the drinking water we transshipped contained 10 times the amount of chlorine that is determined a safe level by the FDA. The reasoning behind it was characteristically military: our boys needed protection from all those foreign germs, Vern. They deserve 10x the protection.

The mechanism for artery breakdown from chlorine is no theory. It has been very solidly established that chlorine nicks the inner lining in the arteries and thereby provides a place for excess cholesterol matrix to begin its process of stuccoing up the arteries.

Joseph ends up by positing that progressive clogging of the arteries cannot exist unless chlorine is consumed in some excess. He describes in detail his controlled experiment inducing atherosclerosis in birds, with the only variable being the presence of chlorinated drinking water - plain tap water. (p.65) The aortas of 95% of the chlorine group were all plaqued up with cholesterol in just a few weeks! The birds were withering and sickly.

The popular press goes round and round about cholesterol. One week it's high fat is not so bad, the next week eggs are definitely out, the next week butter's in.. That technique is straight out of Edward L. Bernays. Why is everybody guessing about the #1 cause of death in the U.S.?

CHLORINE AND DIGESTION

One thing's for sure - chlorine kills bacteria. Only problem with that is the three pounds of friendly bacteria that are supposed to be populating our colon. Their job: the final stages of digestion, as well as vitamin synthesis. Chlorine is in the same category with antibiotics - knocks out all bacteria, the good and the bad. The same killing power that makes chlorine a good disinfectant for drinking water also makes it a harmful additive. We need our good bacteria, called probiotics. Many researchers refer to them as our Second Immune System. Although we can live without probiotics, the digestive system is forced to operate in a diminished fashion. Over time, our health suffers as a result of chlorine's attack on probiotics.

Today about three-fourths of American cities chlorinate the drinking water. That's big money. Very hard to rock that boat. Some cities, such as parts of Los Angeles, have found that ozone purification is cheaper and non-toxic. Other cities are experimenting with a combination of titanium cylinders and UV light. (Popular Science) But decades of payouts, and legislated chlorination - that's an entrenched set-up. Greenpeace and the chlorine activists certainly are not widely read. Even the introductory information in this chapter is not commonly apprehended, though it can be discovered with a little research.

FLUORIDE

At least chlorine will evaporate from a glass of water if you let it sit for an hour or so. No such luck with fluoride. Even cooking, food processing, filtration, or digestion doesn't remove fluoride. Goes right up the food chain. Accumulates in fat cells.

Fluoride is added to the water supply of most American cities for the ostensible purpose of dental hygiene. The reader will be amazed to find out that such a thing is not only unlikely, but actually the reverse of the ongoing reality.

The U.S. has been fluoridating drinking water for so many decades that we hardly think about it. Very few articles appear about fluoridation in newspapers and magazines any more.

This is no accident.

What would you do if you suddenly found out that fluoride was not safe at all, but was actually a carcinogenic industrial waste? What would you think if you suddenly found out that fluoride doesn't stop tooth decay at all, but actually causes teeth to rot and crumble, and by the same mechanism also causes osteoporosis? And after you found out all this, would it surprise you that all federal health agencies have known these facts for years, but have been controlled by the political interests of the nuclear arms, aluminum, and phosphate manufacturers to keep it a secret? Why would they do that? So that, in the total absence of scientific proofs, a toxic industrial waste could be passed off on the public as a nutrient with necessary health benefits, to the tune of $10 billion per year. Or more.

Is a deception of this magnitude possible for the sophisticated, discerning American public? Perhaps Lance Ito could answer a question like that.

Let's start at the beginning.

WHAT IS FLUORIDE?

Fluorine is an element. It is a gas, never occurring naturally in its free state. In microscopic amounts complexed with other minerals, it is often listed as a trace mineral, a nutrient for human nutrition. Other sources disagree, holding that "no experimental work or clinical observations have proved that fluorine is in any manner essential for animals or man." (Alesen, p.5)

This has nothing to do with fluoride or fluoridation. The fluoride added to drinking water is a compound of fluorine that is a chemical byproduct of aluminum, steel, cement, phosphate, and nuclear weapons manufacturing. Such fluoride is manmade. In this form, fluoride has no nutrient value whatsoever. It is one of the most caustic of industrial chemicals. Fluoride is the active toxin in rat poisons and cockroach powder. (Dustrude)

"Hydrofluoric acid is used to refine high octane gasoline, to make fluorocarbons and chlorofluorocarbons for freezers and air conditioners, and to manufacture computer screens, fluorescent light bulbs, semiconductors, plastics, herbicides, -- and toothpaste. It also has the ability to burn flesh to the bone, destroy eyes, and sear lungs so that victims drown in their own body fluid."
- Foulkes

Once in the body, fluoride is a destroyer of human enzymes. It does this by changing their shapes. You'll remember from the Enzymes chapter (w ww.thedoctorwithin.com) that in human biochemistry, thousands of enzymes are necessary for various essential cell reactions that take place every second we're alive. (Howell) Without enzymes, we'd die instantaneously.

CUTS AWAY THE VELCRO STRIPS

Enzymes trigger specific reactions in the body. One way they do this is by having the exact shape necessary, like a key in a lock. Fluoride changes the shape of the enzymes so that they no longer fit. Since enzymes are proteins, once they've been changed, they're now foreign-looking. The body now treats them as invaders, even though they're part of that body. This is known as an autoimmune situation - the body attacks itself.

Another way to look at it: enzymes are long-chain proteins held in certain shapes. Hydrogen bonds are the velcro strips that hold the enzyme in a certain shape. Fluoride comes along and hydrolyzes the enzyme: cuts the velcro strips away. The shape collapses. No more enzyme; now just a foreign protein.

STARTING POINT

The most thorough explanation of the origin, action, diseases, and politics of fluoride was presented in a book called Fluoride the Aging Factor by the late John Yiamouyiannis, PhD. This book is the result of 25 years of research and working behind the scenes of the fluoride phenomenon. Big money generally means big monkey business, you may have noticed by now, and fluoride is right up there. Dr. Yiamouyiannis was the science director of the National Health Federation. He then went on to head the Safe Water Foundation. Dr Y can tell you all about monkey business. No one can comment intelligently about fluoride in the U.S. without addressing with the issues raised in his pivotal book.

It is simply a review of the literature on fluoride up to 1994. This chapter quotes freely from Dr Y's book.

Dr. Y starts by citing hundreds of international studies of fluoridation that have been conducted all over the world since the 1930s. After awhile, there seem to be just two types:

- the studies that were really looking to find out about fluoride
- the studies that were trying to cover up what had already been discovered

A few examples of the former:

• Taylor Study, University of Austin: fluoride concentration of 1PPM (parts per million) increases tumor growth rate by 25%
• Fluoride is more poisonous than lead, and just less poisonous than arsenic
  - Clinical Toxicology of Commercial Products -- 1984
• "A seven ounce tube of toothpaste, theoretically at least, contains enough fluoride to kill a small child."
  - Procter&Gamble, quoted inFluoride the Aging Factor p14
• Fluoride supplements should not be given to children under three years old
  - 1992 Canadian Dental Association Proposed Fluoride Guidelines, Dr. Limeback

FLUORIDE AND AGING

Austrian researchers proved in the 1970s that as little as 1 ppm fluoride concentration can disrupt DNA repair enzymes by 50%. When DNA can't repair damaged cells, we get old fast. (Klein)

Fluoride prematurely ages the body, mainly by distortion of enzyme shape. Again, when enzymes get twisted out of shape, they can't do their jobs. This results in collagen breakdown, eczema, tissue damage, skin wrinkling, genetic damage, and immune suppression. Practically any disease you can name may then be caused. (Yiamouyiannis, Ch.3)

All systems of the body are dependent upon enzymes. When fluoride changes the enzymes, this can damage:

• the immune system
• the digestive system
• the respiratory system
• blood circulation
• kidney function
• liver function
• brain function
• thyroid function

Things wear out too fast - the young body becomes old.

The distorted enzymes are proteins, but now they have become foreign protein, which we know is the exact cause of autoimmune diseases, such as lupus, arthritis, asthma, and arteriosclerosis.

Collagen is the body's glue. That's not just a metaphor; when collagen breaks down, tissues simply lose their substance, their framework. As we saw in the Collagen chapter, this is exactly how we get an enlarged heart, osteoporosis, atrophy and drooping of muscles, joint destruction, kidney and liver disease, falling organs, and bad teeth. Fluoride dissolves the body's glue simply by preventing new collagen from being formed. (Ishida)

Dr Y gives a masterful explanation of fluoride's disruption of collagen. Not only is the collagen incorrectly formed, it is wrongly mineralized. Some collagen, like bones and teeth, should be mineralized in order to give it hardness. Other collagen structures, like ligaments, tendons and, and muscles, should not be mineralized, in order to keep them flexible and resilient. Fluoride confuses the two types. Fluoride mineralizes the tendons, and muscles and ligaments, making them crackly and painful and inflexible. At the same time fluoride interferes with mineralization of bones and teeth, causing osteoporosis and mottling or dental fluorosis.

FLUORIDE RUINS TEETH

Wait a second here! I thought that was the whole reason why we fluoridated water in the first place - to prevent cavities and build strong teeth, right?

Wrong again. And this is where politics and dog-wagging have eclipsed science. Dr Y gives an exhaustive review of the scientific literature of the past 40 years proving beyond a reasonable doubt that fluoride interferes with tooth formation, causing permanent discoloration and actual crumbling. The reader is referred to Chapter 5 of Fluoride The Aging Factor. A few excerpts:

Tooth enamel is laid down by special cells called ameloblasts. Dutch researchers found that fluoride at as little as 1 PPM caused these ameloblasts to malfunction so that they laid down irregular chalky enamel. (Bronkers)

The process whereby teeth are discolored and crumble from fluoridation is know as dental fluorosis.

The U.S. Public Health service has known since the research of its own Dr. HT Dean in 1937 that as fluoride levels rose, so did the percentage of children with dental fluorosis, in a study of 15 major American cities. (Dean)

The same findings were evident in a University of Texas study comparing dental fluorosis in children who lived in fluoridated and unfluoridated areas of Texas. Dr. Segretto found a 35% higher incidence of fluorosis in children who drank water with fluorine concentration of 1-1.4 PPM, compared with those whose water was in the .3 PPM range. This little study was written up in the Journal of the American Dental Association. (Segretto)

Yiamouyiannis goes on and on, citing one peer-reviewed study after another, all coming to the same inescapable conclusion: the more fluoride in the water, the more tooth malformation and discoloration.

It's beyond controversy, when you view these studies from all over the world - New Zealand, India, Denmark, England, Ireland, Italy, Illinois - same finding. Even with this consistent finding across the board, the standard level of fluoridation recommended for dental health in the U.S. is 1 part per million. How is this possible?

A major gain for antifluoridation happened in the past few years, which most people haven't even noticed. The FDA required all toothpaste manufacturers to print a warning on the label that if more than a pea-sized amount of toothpaste is swallowed, the local Poison Control Center should be notified. Check it out! Did we see that on CNN?

The American Dental Association and other defenders of fluoride have testified and continue to insist that dental fluorosis is a "cosmetic condition" and is not a health issue! You hear it all the time from fluoridiots. Permanent malformation of the teeth is a little more serious than cosmetic - but even if it weren't, how can a additive whose only alleged purpose is to benefit teeth destroy teeth?? In their current website, the ADA actually challenges this FDA warning on toothpaste labels, saying that it is unnecessarily strict.

In the words of Canadian fluoridation expert, leading consultant to the Canadian Dental Association, Dr. Hardy Limeback, a University of Toronto biochemist and dentist:

"Since when is a cosmetic problem not a problem when the patient must seek dental treatment to fix it?"

- Toronto Star 25 Apr. 99

Paul Connett, PhD explains that spots on the teeth and dental fluorosis are just an indication of damage to other parts of the body:

"The teeth are windows to what's happening in the bones."
- Griffiths, p 39

And that brings us to

FLUORIDE AND OSTEOPOROSIS

Bone is collagen. We already saw how fluoride disrupts the formation of enzymes necessary for collagen production. So it's no wonder then that the thin brittle bones characteristic of osteoporosis are the result of fluoridation. This is no false claim. Dr Y cites the 1990 study of 541,000 cases of osteoporosis that found a definite connection between hip fractures in women over 65 and fluoride levels. The study was written up in JAMA. (Jacobsen) Several other major studies are cited, massive amounts of research, again all reaching the same conclusion - the undeniable correlation of fluoridation with osteoporosis and hip fracture in the elderly.

Bone is living tissue. It is constantly being replaced with new cells, and having old cells removed. Bone building is a finely balanced, complicated process. Fluoride has been known to disrupt this process since the 1930s. Dr. Alesen, who was the president of the California Medical Association, clearly explains what fluoride does to bone formation. He cites dozens of international scientific studies proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that fluoride has caused thousands of cases of osteoporosis, skeletal thinning, fractures, "rubber bones," anemia, and rickets. (Robotry and Water)

Fluoride also causes osteoporosis by creating a calcium deficiency situation. Fluoride precipitates calcium out of solution, causing low blood calcium, as well as the buildup of calcium stones and crystals in the joints and organs. (Waldbott)

Dozens of other studies, like the Riggs study in the 1990 New England Journal of Medicine, showed that fluoride treatment of osteoporosis in the elderly actually increases skeletal fragility, i.e., more fractures. (Riggs) It's the same mechanism at work: incorrect mineralization, as we saw above. Thin old bones lose calcium; young bones age too rapidly by over-mineralization. (Aksyuk)

Using fluoride as a treatment for diseases like osteoporosis has always been a particularly dumb idea, because of side effects known beforehand:

• general arthritis
• stomach pain
• nausea
• vomiting
• bone spurs
• bone inflammation
• kidney fibrosis
• dental fluorosis

Other mineral contaminants like lead and strontium-90 are damaging to human bone just by means of their occupying space where they don't belong. They are inert. The difference with fluoride is that it is biochemically active. With all the diseases caused by fluoride, the common thread is

".. virtually all these ill effects can be traced to the effect of fluoride on enzymes or proteins, as well as a possible direct effect on the DNA molecule itself."
Fluoride the Aging Factor, p57, 99

Above we saw how fluoride changes the all-important shape of enzymes, thereby rendering them not only useless, but actually foreign antigens.

CANCER AND FLUORIDE

By now we all know how cancer begins with one cell whose inner blueprint - its DNA - has been screwed with. Remember those velcro hydrogen bonds? Guess what other shape they hold together. The double helix - DNA. This turns out to be the exact mechanism of fluoride as a carcinogen. Austrian and Japanese researchers both found that a concentration of 1 PPM fluoride causes disruption of the body's ability to repair its own DNA. Without this most basic cell function, cancer is promoted, and tumor growth is accelerated. (Klein) (Tsutsui)

That's standard fluoride level in U.S. city water: one part per million.

On p. 65 of his book, Dr. Yiamouyiannis provides an amazing chart of some 19 major scientific studies conducted in universities all over the world, together proving beyond a doubt that fluoride causes genetic damage. End of story. Except that on p 68, there is another list of world studies proving the same thing with plants and insects - genetic alteration from fluoride.

Chief chemist of the National Cancer Institute, Dr. Dean Burk when confronted with mountains of data, stated before Congress:

"In point of fact, fluoride causes more human cancer death, and causes it faster than any other chemical."

- Congressional Record 21 July 1976

Can that be misconstrued?

Burk and Yiamouyiannis completed a monumental research project in 1977 in which they compared cancer death rates in 10 fluoridated and 10 non-fluoridated U.S. cities between 1940 and 1970. The results are on p75 of Fluoride the Aging Factor. The unmistakable fact is that the graph shows that for the first ten years (1940-1950), when none of the 20 cities fluoridated, the average cancer deaths were virtually identical. But after 1950, there is a major increase in cancer deaths in every single one of the fluoridated cities, while the nonfluoridated cities remain clustered together at a much lower level of death. [SCATTER CHART]

They actually put a number on it:

"...30,000 to 50,000 deaths each year from various causes may now be attributable to fluoridation. This total includes 10,000 to 20,000 deaths attributable to fluoride-induced cancer every year."
- Yiamouyiannis. p 90

These findings were first confirmed, then denied by the National Cancer Institute (what a surprise). Finally the research was upheld as valid in two separate state courts, Pennsylvania and Illinois. Ask yourself, why are findings of a scientific study being disputed in court? The usual pattern whenever valid research threatens big money.

Another study by the New Jersey Health Dept., cited by Dr. Y, found a 50% increase in bone cancer among young men in fluoridated areas. (Cohn)

Dr. William Hirzy, an officer in the EPA explains:

"Fluoride is a broad-spectrum mutagen. It can cause genetic damage in both plant and animal cells."

Once again, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Hundreds of scientific studies conducted and reported in the most credible universities and agencies throughout the world for the past 25 years have found an unmistakable correlation between fluoridation and cancer deaths. Even the professional opinion makers can't just make all this data vanish.

All they can do is what they're trained to do: change the subject. And keep repeating how safe and effective fluoride is.

BRAIN DAMAGE = LOW IQ

Penetrating observation. The earliest reference to brain disruption from fluoride exposure is found in a recently declassified secret Manhattan Project memo (1944):

"Clinical evidence suggests that C616 [uranium hydrofluoride] may have a rather marked central nervous system effect with mental confusion, drowsiness and lassitude."
- Ferry, 29 Apr 44

Dozens of scientific studies from all over the world have come to the same conclusion. Just a few examples:

Popov, L et al--"Nervous System Damage in Occupational Fluorosis" --Chemical Abstracts vol.14, 7 Oct 74

Guan, Z et al. "Influence of Chronic Fluorosis on Membrane Lipids in Rat Brain"
Neurotoxicology and Teratology, vol. 20 no.5 pp.537

How can all these studies be dismissed and ignored? Many of them are from the most prestigious of scientific journals. And the message has been consistent for the past 40 years - fluoride is a poison. What kind of power can contradict such a cogent, overwhelming body of work? Only one thing - very good --$$$$$$$$! Got it on your first guess!

SO THEN WHY ARE WE FLUORIDATING, FOR THE LAST 60 YEARS?

Unrestricted research into almost any area involving health care is really a tiresome business - it's the same boring story over and over: A Toxin in Search of A Market. First a chemical is created, then an angle is figured out on how to mass market it. Then a disinformation program is put into place to create a permanent smokescreen for the actual scientific data. As we saw with ADD, antibiotics, the history of pharmaceuticals, HRT, heart drugs, chlorination, and now fluoridation - the pattern is consistent. With billions of dollars in play, the chemical industry can afford to choreograph its two most willing marionettes: the media and the medical profession. I didn't make this up; I wish it were otherwise. It's embarrassing to be a human when you find out what's been going on.

But we digress. Fluoridation. A certified poison, by all the government agencies and scientific agencies cited above. Where does the money come in? Toxic disposal. The rise of the EPA since the 1970s. The increase in environmental consciousness as a political tool for creating the illusion of safety in recent decades.

Here's the short version: fluoride is a toxic byproduct in the manufacture of nuclear arms, aluminum, cement, steel, and phosphates. Millions of tons of this poison are produced every year. Imagine the cost of containing and disposing of those mountains of waste every year. It's in the billions. But what if lobbyists from these industries could present "scientific studies" paid for by the industries, and provide for a continual stream of media presentations about the health benefits of fluoride, and create unimaginably lucrative positions for "research" and "education" within the American Dental Association and the AMA, and do all these things in a consistent and unending way, year after year? What are the economic advantages of that? Simple: instead of paying money to dispose of toxic waste, money could now be made by selling fluoride to the water companies of the nation. They'll use the public water supply as a sewer for industrial wastes. And now with these new billions added instead of subtracted, there's plenty to go around, for everyone involved. Out of the Red, into the Black. Somewhere Machiavelli smiles.

DARK ALLIANCE

Up until 1931, the American Dental Association and the US Public Health Service recognized that fluoride caused dental problems, and that every effort should be made to remove such contamination from drinking water. (Fluoride the Aging Factor, p 140) By 1980, the ADA's tune had changed a little:

".there is no evidence implicating naturally occurring fluorides as a health hazard even at eight parts per million."
- ADA News 24 Mar 1980

Following this? In the face of all the decades of our best research, this arrogant and groundless pronouncement, by the profession to whom we have entrusted our teeth, is saying that our water could have 8 times as much fluoride as it has now, and still be perfectly safe! That is power, Sonny Jim.

The Players: ALCOA Aluminum, global producer of aluminum, was founded by Andrew Mellon, who was also appointed Secretary of Treasury, since he seemed to know something about money. ALCOA funded a top research facility known as the Mellon Institute. In 1931, a Mellon Institute report by Gerald Cox suggested that 1 PPM fluoride added to drinking water would be good for the teeth. That was it. No studies, no comparisons, no data. All previous research studies had shown that fluoride was toxic.

Stay with me now. The US Public Health Service (USPHS) at that time was under the jurisdiction of the Secretary of Treasury - Andrew Mellon, who also owned ALCOA. The USPHS sponsored some research put out by their own Dr. HT Dean, manipulating data so that it "proved" that this same figure of 1 PPM resulted in reduction of tooth decay. So now there were two studies, one by Cox and one by Dean, both funded by agencies controlled by ALCOA, both supporting this arbitrary figure of 1 PPM fluoride that should be added to the water to lower tooth decay.

Next problem: sell it to the American Medical Association and the American Dental Association. This took years. Even in 1943, an article in JAMA described fluoride as a poison which damaged enzyme systems even at a concentration of 1 PPM. The article showed concern about 25,000 tons of fluorine released into the atmosphere every year from the phosphate fertilizer industry. (JAMA, Sept 18, 1943).

The following year Journal of the American Dental Association ran another article warning that fluoridated water caused osteoporosis, goiter, and spinal disease. They stated that "the potentialities for harm far outweigh those for good." (JADA, 1 Oct 1944)

So how did fluoridation get started then, with all this information - thousands of negative scientific papers and only two favorable studies? ALCOA money, that's how. In 1944, ALCOA hired an attorney named Oscar Ewing at a salary of $750,000 per year. That same year Ewing was appointed to the Federal Security Adminisrration. The USPHS was a division of the Federal Security Association. So now ALCOA's boy was in a position to control the policies of the Public Health Service.

Ewing chose his PR man for fluoridation: Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud.

FREUD, FRAUD, AND FLUORIDE

Edward L. Bernays, described by the Washington Post as the "original spin doctor" was responsible for evolving the pro-fluoridation propaganda and disinformation machine. How anxious he was to put his uncle's ideas and methods of persuasion into action. (Dr. Y, p143)

"... those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country...our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of."
- Bernays (Propaganda)

Using classical Freudian principles, Bernays maintained that a well-oiled propaganda machine could make the public believe practically anything, even the exact opposite of what had been already proven by all existing scientific research. And this is exactly what Ewing needed in the case of fluoridation.

With help from "experts" of the Manhattan Project, like Harold Hodge, New York State politicians quickly learned which side their bread was buttered on. In May of 1945, the city of Newburgh, NY was the first to "try" fluoridation. The residents were supposed to be monitored by the state Health Department for ten years. That became the pattern - fluoride is the first drug in history to be tested on the general population with no previous research. (Griffiths) Except of course for vaccines. (The Sanctity of Human Blood)

One of the next cities to fall was Grand Rapids, Michigan. In July 1945, in the face of persistent warnings from the AMA, Grand Rapids succumbed to Bernays' propaganda machine and began a ten year "test period" of fluoridation in which tooth decay rates would be monitored. No one asked the question why the testing was being done on humans in an entire city. The project was run by HT Dean, using the statistics of Cox's original 1931 paper that arbitrarily claimed that 1 PPM fluoride was a safe level to prevent tooth decay, with no research to back it up. Dr. Dean almost single- handedly developed the hypothesis that fluoride could prevent cavities. He is "the father of fluoridation." Dean did no research on his own, and in later years, twice admitted in court that Cox's original statistics were incorrect! (Foulkes, 1992) But the entire system of fluoridation of US city water is based on the admittedly unscientific "findings" of Dean and Cox.

Bernays' propaganda machine now went into full swing - ads with smiling children with beautiful teeth flooded the country's media. All anti-fluoride studies and articles were systematically suppressed because they weren't sanctioned by the big lobbyists for the aluminum and fertilizer industries. Tons of new literature written not by doctors and scientists but by PR people and psychologists portrayed those opposing the sacred fluoridation as right- wing wackos. Just like in Orwell's book 1984, they tried to re-write history, to go back and change the findings of valid research, not by doing new research, but simply by new PR. (Miller)

"I sometimes wonder if the Aluminum Co. of America... might not have a deep interest in getting rid of its waste products from the manufacture of aluminum because these products contain a large amount of fluoride....it is interesting to note that Oscar Ewing who now heads up the FSA, the parent organization of the US Public Health Service, and the firm of attorneys he deals with.represents the Aluminum Co. of America."
- Congressman A.L. Miller

FLUORIDE AND THE ATOMIC BOMB

It gets darker. You may want to go for popcorn here. Dovetailing contemporaneously into all the above activity is some mind-blowing information that was recently uncovered by two reporters commissioned to write an article for the Christian Science Monitor. Working from secret government documents that have just become declassified in the last three years or so, Joel Griffiths and Chris Bryson have illuminated a very scary liaison: fluoride and the Manhattan Project.

As we all remember, the Manhattan Project was the WWII secret program which brought the atomic bomb into existence. Turns out fluoride was a key component in the production of this bomb, in two main applications: in the uranium complex itself, and also as a toxic waste material. (Fluoride & Brain Damage)

There was an accident in 1943 that had to be covered up, big time. DuPont was the chemical company charged with producing millions of gallons of fluoride for the Manhattan Project. A DuPont facility in Deepwater, New Jersey dumped so much fluoride into the air and water that things they couldn't hide started happening in the towns downwind:

• poultry died
• horses got sick and couldn't work
• cows became so crippled they could only crawl on their bellies to graze
• the peach crop was destroyed
• fluoride content of local vegetables was off the charts
• abnormally high level of fluoride in the blood of the local people
• even the workers at DuPont began to get sick

Now all this may not seem like a big deal compared with the development of the most top secret weapon in history, but the farmers in those towns didn't know nothing about no atomic bomb. Hiroshima hadn't happened yet. All these farmers knew was that the chemical company was poisoning the air and the water.

The chief toxicologist for the Manhattan Project was a guy named Harold Hodge. Hodge was the first to notice the horrific effects of fluoride pollution on the local environment, and alerted his superiors in several memos, which have now been declassified. In true military fashion, Hodges' superiors took the warnings seriously and thought them worthy of investigation, not because of the dangers to human and animal life, but because of the legal liability to DuPont and the government if the farmers were successful in a lawsuit. So the head of the Manhattan Project, Gen. Groves, directed Harold Hodge to research the toxicity of fluoride spills for one reason: their own legal defense against the farmers. (Griffiths)

Why was this never a movie?

Hodge was granted funding to study the nerve effects of fluoride way back in 1944. (Ferry) It is likely that the research was carried out, but it is missing from the declassified papers. What a surprise. Not until 1991 was the there any published research on the neurological effects of fluoride, when it was discovered that fluoride was a powerful neuro-toxin that could affect human brain development and functioning, even at low levels. (Mullenix) Even though Hodge collaborated on Mullenix's research some 50 years after the Manhattan Project, and it is almost certain that Hodge was the one who conducted the missing research in 1944, Hodge maintained a strict silence on the subject.

These guys knew how to keep a secret.

Here's just one example of the difference between old published versions of fluoride research documents and secret versions of those same documents that have recently been declassified:

old version, published in Journal of the American Dental Association, Aug 1948:
the men who used experimental fluoride had fewer cavities

secret version, recently de-classified:
most of the men had no teeth left
- Griffiths & Bryson, p 41

Remember, this was the beginning of the Atomic Age. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were just the opening act. The game was not world destruction, but rather atomic bomb production. By 1946 the government and industry were out to arm the world with atomic, and eventually nuclear, weaponry. The billions of dollars all that represented, not to mention the balance of world power (America first) - all this was not going to be derailed just because a few horses died and the peaches didn't come in one year.

LAWDOGS GET A BONE

So here's what they did. You've probably guessed it. Whom do you call when you want to turn water into wine, night into day, black into white? That's right. Lawyers. But not the local variety. These guys were from Washington. They wear Armani. They play bridge. They knew that if the farmers won the lawsuits, it would open the door to a whole storm of lawsuits, and that could seriously interfere with bomb production. Fluoride was essential. Bomb production was essential. So they did the only thing a red-blooded American could do. They lied their heads off. They proved that fluoride

• was not the cause of all this destruction
• was totally safe, indeed so safe that
• it should be added to the drinking water as a nutrient

This took some doing. Not only did they have the local farmers to bamboozle; the FDA started sniffing around. After some masterful negotiating by Dupont's FDA lawyers, everyone came to realize that the tremendous liability to which DuPont and the government were both open could be swept away, delayed, and sidetracked by agreeing that the fluoride problem needed "research." And who was charged with doing that research? The US Army! That should be an unbiased scientific outcome, right?

Ultimately DuPont got away with it. They avoided copping to any serious liability by claiming that to admit how much fluoride had been released into the New Jersey environment was a matter of national security! Without that information, the farmers' case fell apart, and most of them settled for token sums of a few hundred dollars.

One way the bomb-makers diverted attention from the lawsuits was to take the hint from Harold Hodge's memo:

"Would there be any use in making attempts to counteract the local fear of fluoride on the part of the residents.through lectures on F [fluoride] toxicology and perhaps the usefulness of F in tooth health?"
- Hodge

And this is where the bomb-makers found willing allies in industry and medicine who saw an angle in using public drinking water as a dumping ground for industrial and military toxic waste.

For the whole detonating story, check out Griffith and Bryson's well-researched "Fluoride, Teeth, and the A-Bomb."

FLUORIDIOTS GAIN POLITICAL MOMENTUM

Fluoridation gathered momentum, supported by the billions that could be made from selling a toxic waste to city water providers and the untold billions behind the arms manufacturers outfitting the world with nuclear weapons. Gradually, the AMA and the ADA, began to soften their views toward fluoridation, until they had made a complete 180-degree shift in their opinion, as cited above.

In 1951 a huge pep rally was held for all the state dental directors. The focus was not to present research pro and con on fluoridation, but rather, how to get the public to accept the policy from above, the new religion of fluoridation.
(4th Annual Conference, 1951)

By 1952, the American Dental Association had turned completely, publishing the articles of radical fluoridiot Frank Bull in the JADA. Bull's whole focus was disinformation; avoiding confrontation with actual studies. As the B in BS, Bull put the propaganda theories of Bernays into actual practice.

Next, Procter and Gamble scored big when they got the ADA to endorse fluoride in toothpaste. Any dentists who spoke out against this ADA decision were censured, lost grant funding, or were thrown out of the ADA. (Fluoride the Aging Factor, p147)

By 1960 the alliance was formed: ALCOA, the US Public Health Service, the Federal Security Administration, the American Dental Association, and Procter&Gamble. It was like all the decades of research showing fluoride as a poison had never existed. Anyone bringing it up was subject to attack and persecution on any level possible.

DOESN'T THE AMERICAN DENTAL ASSOCIATION KNOW THE TRUTH?

You bet it does. Many articles in their main journals, JADA and the Journal of Dental Research, have proven for years that fluoride causes dental fluorosis. (JADA, vol 96 p78 (1978); vol.80, p777(1970) and JDR, vol.17, p.393 (1938); vol 67 p318 ( 1988); vol 96 p1158, (1978), to cite just a few from Fluoride The Aging Factor.

But despite all the pertinent studies and years of research, the American Dental Association is formally in favor of fluoridation! This position has never changed since its 1979 White Paper on Fluoridation. Politics eclipses science, as we see in excerpts like this:

• "... opponents of fluoridation are uninformed or misinformed" or "self-styled experts whose qualifications for speaking out on such a scientific issue as fluoridation were practically non-existent or whose motivations are self-serving.."
  
  or the amazing
• "... individual dentists must be convinced that they need not be familiar with scientific reports on fluoridation."
  
  or the ever-present non-sequitur
• ".what kind of mentality would reject the opinion of those who are qualified by education, training, experience.." and blah, blah, woof woof..
  
  or the old stand-by
• "...numerous studies have shown." although none are ever named.
  
  or the Orwellian
• "... the advice of behavioral scientists should be sought with regard to realistic, convincing rebuttals."

Rebuttals? This isn't a high school debate. What about presenting research?

Always remember - the ADA is a trade union, a lobby whose main purpose is furthering the economic advancement of the dental profession. It doesn't represent dental health. And in many cases the ADA doesn't represent the dentists themselves. This is especially true in the class action suit filed by some 40 dentists against the ADA in a DC Superior Court. The charges? Ethical breach of the public trust for recommending fluoridation while failing to inform its members and the public of the widespread available literature proving toxicity. (Foulkes)

The American Dental Association has a website which is a masterpiece of disinformation: www.ada.org. At the beginning of the Fluoridation Questions section, we find the standard fluoridiot smokescreen posture in which natural fluoride compounds that exist in many places in nature are presented as the same fluoride which is added to municipal water. This is unmitigated, deliberate, fraudulent misrepresentation. The fluoride added to water is a toxic industrial byproduct in a form nature could never have come up with. Once you realize this simple fact, you will be able to see the rest of the Website Whitewash in its proper light. While you are reading the sections of this website, just remember that the ADA is a trade lobby, whose mission is to assure people of the safety and efficacy of a drug that is not safe and not effective, so that the interests of its fellow trade lobbies from the chemical industry are best served. The ADA is a mouthpiece for a huge constituency. Their website is the modern manifestation of Edward L. Bernays program of disinformation and crowd control, carrying the dogma of Cox, Dean, and Bull into the 21st century.

Dr Y gives a good summary of the liaison between the US Public Health Service and the American Dental Association, and their control by salaried employees of the aluminum and phosphate industries, in his Chapter 17. It's the predictable unholy alliance between big money, lobbyists, and government agencies who determine policies. Just a quick glance:

THE EPA AND THE ADA SELL OUT

In 1974, Congress passed the Safe Drinking Water Act. Political forces cited in the above paragraph caused safe fluoride levels to be set by the EPA at 1.4 to 2.4 PPM! This is after decades of research showing all the above diseases could be caused by less than 1 PPM.

The American Dental Association's reaction to these new levels? With no new research whatsoever, the ADA began pressuring the EPA to raise the maximum level to 8 PPM! Their reasoning? For the past 20 years the ADA had been using 1 PPM as the recommended level. Now they didn't like the idea of the EPA doubling the ADA's old recommendation without consulting them. The ADA wanted to be in control, no matter what the effect on the public health.

The ADA was immediately backed by the entire Fluoridiot Underworld, because higher levels meant the polluting industries could sell even more toxic fluoride wastes to municipal water suppliers.

Note that the entire controversy for setting the levels of toxicity for fluoride in US drinking water was not based at all on science, but entirely on politics. The EPA was maneuvered into contracting a "new study" of fluoride toxicity to a research group called ICAIR Life Systems in 1985. Dr. Y cites a few of ICAIR's "findings":

• "dental fluorosis was not an adverse health effect"
• "teeth with fluorosis are desirable"
• skeletal fluorosis has not been found below 4 PPM
• there is no data on fluoride and genetic damage
• there is no data on fluoride as a carcinogen
  - Fluoride The Aging Factor, p159

This is the kind of shenanigans tax dollars are spent on: lies and disregard for decades of important scientific research. But the waste of time and money is secondary to the real issue: these lower primates are endangering public health for their own political advantage and power tripping. Big news flash, right?

The result of all the hearings, fraudulent reports, and maneuvering was that in 1989 the EPA tried to raise the maximum allowable level of fluoride to 4 PPM! (Yiamouyiannis, p 161)

Today, the recommended level remains at 1 - 1.2 PPM, with the maximum allowable level set at 4 PPM by the EPA.

Now check this out: 4 parts per million is 4000 parts per billion, right, math wizards? OK. 4000 parts per billion of fluoride are allowed in drinking water, according to the EPA. Compare that with the allowable levels of Arsenic, Lead, and Mercury:

MAXIMUM CONTAMINANT LEVEL ALLOWED IN U.S. DRINKING WATER:

ARSENIC _______ 50 PARTS PER BILLION
LEAD___________15 PARTS PER BILLION
FLUORIDE _____4000 PARTS PER BILLION

source: EPA National Primary Drinking Water Standards ( July 1987)

Remember this citation: "Fluoride is more poisonous than lead, and just less poisonous than arsenic."
- Clinical Toxicology of Commercial Products - 1984

What's wrong with this picture?

DELAYED REACTION

As California Medical Association president Dr. Alesen points out, concentration in parts per million sidesteps the issue, regarding something that accumulates in the body year after year. The EPA is comparing fluorine to vitamins, for which there are minimum daily requirements. But vitamins are completely used up in a day or less. They don't accumulate. In addition, setting an arbitrary level of 1 PPM fluoride in the drinking water provides for a wide variation in toxicity: some people drink half a glass of water per day, while others drink two liters. This idea is a very big deal when you're talking about something that never goes away in the body.

"It is obvious that the important factor is not the concentration of the fluoride in the water supply, but the total amount consumed."
- Alesen, p.6

That is why fluoride poisoning can be disguised - diseases like skeletal fluorosis may take 25 or 30 years to appear, since accumulation of fluoride in the bones is slow and gradual. (Shortt)

WHAT DO THE REAL EXPERTS SAY?

"When historians come to write about this period, they will single out [fluoridation] as the single biggest mistake in public policy that we've ever had."
- Paul Connett, PhD, Biochemistry

"Sodium fluoride is a registered rat poison and roach poison. It has been a protected pollutant for a very long time."
- William Hirzy, PhD President of the Union of Professional Employees of the EPA

"sodium fluoride is a very toxic chemical, acting as an enzyme poison, direct irritant and calcium inactivator..It reacts with growing tooth enamel and with bones to produce irreversible damage."
- Granville Knight, MD president of the American Academy of Nutrition

Congressional Record, 31 July 56 (Robotry, p. 22) "I am appalled at the prospect of using water as a vehicle for drugs. Fluoride is a corrosive poison that will produce serious effects on a long range basis. Any attempt to use water this way is deplorable."
- Charles Gordon Heyd, MD, president, AMA

"no physician in his right mind would hand to his patient a bottled filled with a dangerous drug with instructions to take as much or as little of it as he wished. And yet, the Public Health Service is engaged upon a widespread propaganda program to insist that communities do exactly that.The purpose of administering fluoride is not to render the water supply pure and potable but to contaminate it with a dangerous, toxic drug for the purpose of administering mass medication to the consumer, without regard to age or physical condition."
- L. Alesen, MD, president of the California Medical Association, Robotry, p14

"Fluoridation is the greatest fraud that has ever been perpetrated and it has been perpetrated on more people than any other fraud has."
- Albert Schatz, PhD Nobel Laureate for discovering streptomycin
quoted in Sutton's Fluoridation:The Greatest Fraud

"More people have died in the last 30 years from cancer connected with fluoridation than all the military deaths in the entire history of the United States."
- Dean Burk, PhD National Cancer Institute--Fluoridation:A Burning Controversy

"Fluoridation is the greatest case of scientific fraud of this century, if not of all time."
- EPA scientist, Dr. Robert Carton (Downey, 2 May 99)

Why do we never hear any of this?

IT ISN'T JUST THE WATER

Adding fluoride to the drinking water causes bioaccumulation in our cells, year after year. If fluoride is in the water, it's everywhere:

• growing vegetables and fruit
• washing vegetables and fruit
• in the meat of animals who have drunk fluoridated water
• in toothpaste
• in canned foods
• in processed foods
• in soft drinks
• in beer

A 1998 laboratory analysis done at Sequoia Analytical Labs in California showed very high concentrations of fluoride in the following foods:

• Dole pineapple, canned-
• Snapple
• Coke Classic
• Hansen's soda
• Minute Maid orange juice-
• Gerber strawberry juice for babies
• Amstel Lite beer
• Rice Dream
• Sunny Delight orange drink
• Pepsi

Another analysis done in 1998 by Jupiter Environmental Labs in Florida showed similar findings:

food..................fluoride in PPM (parts per million)

Gerber White Grape juice__________ 3.5
Gatorade_________________________.44
Diet Coke_______________________1.12
Lipton Ice Tea_____________________.58
Sprite____________________________.73
Hawaiian Punch____________________.85

Last one for now. A study in the Journal of Clinical Pediatric Dentistry:

food ----------------fluoride in PPM (parts per million)

Welch's 100% Grape juice______2.6
Ocean Spray Cranapple________1.8
Hi-C Apple-grape_____________1.16
Minute Maid Grape____________1.25
Minute Maid White Grape_______3.0
Gerber's White Grape__________6.8

And it's not just the juices: Froot Loops cereal was found to have 2.1 ppm by Expert Chemical Analysis of San Diego.

These are just a few examples of fluoride levels in some common grocery store items consumed by most Americans. The point is that there's an notable fluoride content in many, if not the majority of processed foods in our refrigerators and pantries. That's not mentioning our fruits and vegetables, even if they're "organic' but grown with city water. We're taking in a ton of fluoride from ubiquitous sources. It accumulates over the years in our collagen, bones, and teeth.

HIRED GUN BACKS DOWN

In 1973, British Columbia was considering mandatory fluoridation. They gave the job of researching and reporting the topic to Richard Foulkes, MD. Foulkes then wrote a 2000 page report and recommended that legislation begin to make fluoride mandatory in Canada. Based on that work, Canada began to fluoridate. Then something happened. Little by little, Foulkes found out that the statistics that his researchers had based their findings on were largely falsified. It took Foulkes years to run down the truth, but by 1992, he shocked the country by backing down from his original recommendation:

"I now hold a different view. .the fluoridation of community water supplies can no longer be held to be either safe or effective in the reduction of dental caries. Therefore, the practice should be abandoned."
- Foulkes, 1992

Foulkes is not some tree-hugger from Santa Cruz. He is one of Canada's top scientific researchers. Many areas of Canada listened and stopped fluoridating. Want to read a first-hand story about lies and greed and disregard for human health and crooked deals between government and industry? Read Dr. Foulkes stuff. Another pro-fluoride Canadian scientist, Dr. Hardy Limeback, changed his tune when he learned that 30-65% of Canadian children now have visible signs of overexposure to fluoride: dental fluorosis. Limeback:

"Children under three should never use fluoridated toothpaste. Or drink fluoridated water."
- Toronto Star Michael Downey interview with Limeback

Such research also prompted the Canadian Dental Association in 1992 to keep fluoride supplements from children of three and under. But attacking fluoride supplement pills is just a smokescreen to protect fluoridation of drinking water. Most research has found all the above ill effects at concentrations even less than the standard 1 PPM that is in most city water. It's not the supplements that are killing us; it's the fluoridated water.

FLUORIDATION IN OTHER COUNTRIES

If fluoridation is as safe and effective as the American Dental Association says it is, why don't other countries do it?

The U.S. is nowhere near the top of any health list which compares other countries of the world, as we saw in Chapter One. So what are the healthy countries doing?

If fluoride is so great, why have the following countries either never fluoridated or else stopped when they found out how bad it was?:

• West Germany
• The Netherlands
• France
• Belgium
• Finland
• Sweden
• Norway
• Denmark
• Japan
• Italy
• Scotland

- Smith, G., - Foulkes (1992)

Only about 2% of the population of Europe is subjected to fluoridated water.
- Yiamouyiannis, p.208

LOCKED IN

Three reasons why we're so far down the road of toxic fluoridation, it's hard to come back:

1. To reverse the policy of fluoridation now would be for the ADA, the EPA, the FDA, and the USPHS, Congress, and all the municipal water polluters in the US to admit that they made a mistake. Not a good move for re-election.

2. To criticize fluoridation as a policy would challenge the billions of tons of fluoride being released into the air and water by the nuclear, aluminum, phosphate, steel, glass, cement, and petrochemical industries.

3. If fluoridation stopped, a multi-million dollar gravy train of research grants, propaganda contracts, and sweetheart arrangements between government and industry would vaporize overnight.

FREUD AND THE SLIME FACTOR

It may not be a good idea to blind ourselves to the presence of cold-blooded 24-karat Evil as it exists in the world today. But it's not like some madman in a James Bond movie with terminal acne, dressed in a metallic suit, speaking terrible English from his office in a hollowed-out volcano somewhere, threatening to destroy the world. No, no. These guys are polite and well-groomed, and have impeccable credentials. More like Al Pacino where he's the devil in that movie with Keanu Reeves - likable, urbane, well-traveled, appreciates a fine wine, knows when to say that one perfect remark to make things work. Or even Billy Crystal where he's the devil in that Woody Allen movie - very charming and confident. These are not people to be confronted and defeated. No, these individuals advance. Their expertise is in how to get on, pageantry, presentation.

Beneath them, are the ones who do the work. Dr. Y chronicles a group of low-level bureaucrats and opinion makers whose unsupported, semi-literate propaganda gets constant media play. Propaganda can't be brilliant, and doesn't have to be true or make sense. It just has to be simple and be repeated over and over every day. These same pretenders and "social scientists" are coincidentally the stable of "experts" who are continually given extensive media space to criticize anything alternative or holistic that threatens organized medicine. Doctors of the evening. Flaccid guns for hire. Their tactics are low-level and powerful, according to the Bernays formula:

- conduct no research
- avoid the real issues when possible
- never engage in any debate where actual research data will be used
- attack the opponent, not the issue
- don't try to instruct, or lead through a process of step-by-step education
- persuade; do not inform
- use emotional phrases to distract people from the real issues
- when confronted, change the subject
- cover up the real studies; never refer to them
- pretend there is some favorable research by using phrases like "Numerous studies have shown." or "Research has proven..." or "Scientific investigators have found.." but then never cite anything
- always harp on the "superior education and training" of the fluoridation people, pretending that the most educated doctors and professionals favor fluoridation, even though Dr Y thoroughly proves that most of the propaganda has been written by non-science people, generally with public relations or mass-psychology backgrounds
- keep repeating unfounded falsehoods about the safety and effectiveness of proven poisons
- remind people how many decades fluoridation has been going on
- favor mandatory fluoridation legislation, removing all opportunity for free discussion when possible
- try to keep all opposing evidence from being seen or considered by any policy-making agency
- omit pertinent data from actual studies

Above all, never stop repeating the same falsehoods, over and over.

Like him or not, we must respect Freud's grasp of the human mind and what motivates it. Freud is the father of psychoanalysis, and even though that profession has largely fallen by the wayside, diluted by a thousand social servants, his original principles have found a home: the media. Shaping mass opinion in the "proper" mold - the PC lemmings can be guided to practically any cliff the controllers can dream up.

REALITY CHECK

Most people have no opportunity to have the facts of the issues presented to them, because of the virtual blackout of information in the media. That's why all this seems so odd. With the help of the colossal disinformation machine in operation, according to the American Dental Association probably about 62% of the drinking water in the U.S. is fluoridated. (www.ada.org) But some courts have shown the other side of the picture, and beginning to see through the standard shell-games of the pro-fluoridationists.

In a famous legal battle over fluoridation in the 1950s we find the judge letting us have it:

"By [fluoridating the water] the municipal authorities...arrogate to themselves the sole right to decide what medicine is good for the health of the water consumers, and thereby the municipal water system becomes a direct conduit for the transportation of medicine from the apothecary's pestle to the patient, without the latter's consent. Thus will the people be deprived of a very important part of their constitutional liberty under our republican form of government and the police state will be substituted for the police power of the state."

- Justice Donworth in KAUL vs. CITY OF CHEHALIS
from Robotry, p 18

Two decades later a Pennsylvania Supreme Court judge made a meticulous review of all available research, both pro and con, before entering his 1979 injunction against fluoridation. His Honor was less than impressed with the wit of the fluoridationists:

"The proponents of fluoridation do nothing more than try to impugn the objectivity of those who oppose fluoridation."

- Judge John Flaherty
Pennsylvania Supreme Court

Judge Flaherty wrote a letter to the Mayor of Auckland, New Zealand stating:

".In my view the evidence is quite convincing that the addition of sodium fluoride to the public water supply at one part per million is extremely deleterious to the human body, and.there is no convincing evidence to the contrary."

- The Arthritis Trust, 1994

THE LEGAL NOVELTY OF FLUORIDATION

Fluoridation is a totally new idea, from a Constitutional point of view. It's nothing like adding chlorine. Although chlorine has toxic side effects, it actually does something beneficial to the water - chlorine purifies the water. Fluoride does no such thing. Fluoride is a drug, a medication that supposedly has beneficial effects for a small percentage of the population.

"The purpose of administering fluoride is not to render the water supply pure and potable but to contaminate it with a dangerous toxic drug for the purpose of administering mass medication to the consumer without regard to age or physical condition."

- Alesen, p 16

In other words, without consent. And giving drugs without consent is in direct violation of international codes of war behavior, like Nuremberg and the Geneva Accords. Commenting on the famous KAUL case above, Judge Hamley had this to say:

"What future proposals may be made to treat noncontagious disease by adding ingredients to our water supply, or food or air, only time will tell. When that day arrives, those who treasure their personal liberty will look in vain for a constitutional safeguard. The answer will be : "You gave the Constitution away in the Kaul case."
- Robotry, p. 18

CONVERSATION STOPPER

Want to stop a fluoridation advocate in his tracks? Ask him to cite exact legitimate studies that prove fluoridation prevents tooth decay. Then find them. Besides the few bogus political documents by Dean and Cox, cited above, there aren't any. Fluoride research is a huge area. The fact that most studies have been almost completely suppressed for the past 50 years mars many illusions about the democratic process.

If people want fluoride in their drinking water, let them buy supplements. Fluoridation of municipal water has nothing to do with health. It's just politics.

A THOUSAND LITTLE BATTLES

The fluoridation battle is being waged back and forth in the individual cities and towns across America. Many districts have never fluoridated. Many others have recently decided to begin fluoridation. Still another group of 63 cities, since 1900, which had fluoridated for a long time, have voted to stop. (Jones) It's an ongoing struggle, with million of dollars of fluoridiot funding available for presentations, flyers, and media ads in any community where the issue is coming up for a vote. If fluoridation is defeated this year, it may appear on the ballot again the following year if the city is on the Priority Schedule.

California's Priority Schedule is a list of 167 communities in California which are now being targeted by the formidable alliance of fluoridation interests. (Table 64434-A) Doesn't look like they'll run out of cash any time in this life: support comes from the slush funds and lobbyists of the mega industrial polluters who wish to maintain the public water works as their private sewer. They want to keep this 50-year gravy train rolling, and the best way to do that is marketing and promotion. Here are the Top Ten of the 1999 Priority Schedule in California:

Helix Water District
Ventura, CA
Daly City, CA
Escondido, CA
Santa Maria CA
Fair Oaks Water District
Manhattan Beach, CA
Sweetwater Authority
Santa Barbara, CA
El Dorado Irrigation District

It floors you to realize the immense amount of scientific research and legal opinion proving the toxicity of fluoride since the 1930s, that has been ignored and suppressed. Why did all those people do all that work? With every new city that places fluoridation on the ballot, all the old arguments are dragged out, as if it's from scratch every time, without the benefit of input from all the other hundreds of communities that have gone through this same battle. Divide and conquer - worked for the Romans.

Antifluoridationist information programs are often privately funded grassroots little organizations, but their influence is being felt across the nation. With the rise of the Internet, it is getting harder to keep people from learning the real effects about fluoride. For these reasons, clean water is very slowing making progress against the totalitarian forces of mass medications. But the struggle never ends.

OTHER CONTAMINANTS

Chlorine and fluoride are added on purpose to the water. We haven't even mentioned the millions of tons of industrial pollutants that sneak into the earth's water supply every year. To give just one small example, Congress did a study in 1979 of the extent of industrial pollution between 1950 and 1970. They verified just a part of what was actually dumped into America's water supply: the top 14% of industrial polluters discharged 1.5 trillion pounds of industrial wastes into the water supply in that 20 year period.

What about the other 86%?

Think it's improved since 1970? Consider this:

The only federal agency for ensuring clean drinking water is the EPA. In 1997, after the cryptosporidium deaths in Milwaukee and Las Vegas, Clinton tried to upgrade the provisions of the 1986 Safe Drinking Water Act. But the EPA only regulates some 60 chemicals-there are thousands of chemical pollutants in the water! And the states are individually claiming that complying with the restrictions on just those 60 are "too expensive" because they just don't have the money. Most water systems are operating on very old designs with inadequate capacity. (Kupua A'o, p16)

As a result, in 1991-1992 alone, the EPA reported over 250,000 violations of the Safe Drinking Water Act, affecting more than 100 million Americans. (Natural Resources Defense Council) For those 250,000 violations, guess on how many the EPA took enforcement action. Just guess. About 600.

Looks like we're on our own out here.

HOW CAN WE GET PURE, CLEAN WATER?

The tap water in this country seems to have a few problems:

organochlorines
fluoride
PCBs
THMs
heavy metals
resistant biologicals

You'd think that since we created the problem, we could fix it. But even if Greenpeace or someone took over the government of the world tomorrow and stopped all further pollution tonnage, it would be years, decades before the water would be like it was before the Industrial Revolution. These contaminants will be around for centuries. By now everyone knows what the concept of half-life means. Different data sources, different time frames, but one thing is certain: the water cannot be cleaned up in our lifetime, no matter what is done. Writing a sentence like that is a shocker. Where is my ninja team?

So what can we do?

Don't drink the tap water for starters. But does that also mean don't wash vegetables, make ice cubes, or cook with tap water? Yes, it does, because heat doesn't destroy fluoride, heavy metals, or other contaminants. Remember the word bioaccumulative.

So the first step is

BOTTLED WATER

That's right - drag it home from the market every week. Or the 5-gallon bottle from the water store. Is that safe enough? Maybe. Who knows? You have to trust two groups of people in order to be sure:

- the regulating agencies
- the sellers

Water stores sell reverse osmosis water - no minerals. Bottled water is only as good as the monitoring system in place. Step right up.

FILTERS

"Buy a filter or be a filter." That's one company's slogan.

Today there is enough grassroots consciousness about the dangers of tap water that cheap carbon filters are now available in any hardware store which attach easily to the kitchen faucet. It is likely that such filters get rid of most of the chlorine - for awhile. But to really get the resistant biologicals, the fluoride, heavy metals, and other contaminants, the customer may consider one of the high-end drinking water filters. These cost between two and four hundred dollars and come in models for both over and under the sink.

Names like Alpine, MultiPure, and Spectrapure are among the dozens of brand names that have come along during the past 20 years. Multipure seems to be far out front at this time. Everyone claims to be the best, of course, but we can find some important similarities in their advertising. When you begin to compare the better water filters, you notice common concerns:

chlorine
THMs
chloriform
chloramines
cryptosporidium and giardia lamblia cysts
fluoride
pesticides and toxic chemicals
heavy metals
minerals
MTBEs
nitrates

Killing microbials is not a big deal since most of that's been done by chlorine. Most contaminants are removed by the better filters. The problem when choosing a filter seems to come down to four main concerns: fluoride, minerals, THMs, and nitrates. Difficult to find one filter that does everything: many reverse osmosis filters take out most contaminants, but also the healthy minerals. Many of the high-end carbon filters will not remove fluoride or nitrates, but leave the healthy minerals.

Fluoride is obviously a biggie. Find out if the filter you are about to buy removes fluoride, and what percentage. After what we've learned about fluoride, we should expect a filter to remove it, wouldn't you say? Problem is: the demand. Due to fluoridiot propaganda, most Americans don't even realize fluoride is bad, and therefore don't think about it when considering a water filter.

NSF is a third-party non-profit testing agency that has been rating water filters for the past 50 years. Always ask - is it NSF-certified? For what? Don't be fooled if they say "NSF-tested.' Big difference.

Minerals is an area of some controversy. You've got the hard water / soft water debate. Hard water has more minerals in it, w hich obviously is better for the bones and teeth, and probably for the heart as well. That makes sense, although as we saw in the Minerals chapter, elemental minerals are the least absorbed of all types. Elemental means from rocks, and that's the kind that would be in spring water, and therefore in filtered water, except for reverse osmosis. In my opinion, hard water is better than distilled.

Most naturopaths and holistic nutritionists don't like distilled water because they say it leaches minerals from the bones and teeth. In general, that seems logical, although Dr. Y says it doesn't make any difference unless the person is extremely malnourished. The truth is, no formal studies comparing distilled with mineral water have been done, so it's all pretty theoretical. But thinking about the Hunzas and their 120-year lifespan that was attributed to the glacial mineral waters they drank, one can see the value of minerals in drinking water. A high-end water filter should take this discussion into consideration and give reasons about the importance or unimportance of filtering out certain minerals.

Comes down to a choice: reverse osmosis or carbon block. With reverse osmosis you've got no fluoride filtration, no minerals, and wasting about 4-9 gallons to get one gallon of pure water. (A'o, p72) With most high-end carbon mesh filters, you can get rid of everything but fluoride, and you'll still have minerals.

These are questions for the filter sales force. Make "em dance for you. Caveat emptor - only 5 states have any regulations about what water filter manufacturers can say. On the Internet - it's a total jungle!

There is one excellent little book which can save a lot of research time: Don't Drink the Water. The author goes into great detail in comparing the attributes and quality of the basic filter units. He points out the advantages of placing a KDF filter before the carbon filter in order to insure that bacteria won't begin to grow within the carbon. Bottom line in my opinion, if you want to solve the whole filtration question, just buy a Multipure and put in under the sink. (1 831 763 1967) Next problem.

THE REST OF THE ICEBERG

Sorry if this chapter has been Information Overload. The materials cited really only scratch the surface of the research that has been done in these areas. The purpose of the chapter has been to acquaint the reader with some of the basic issues in regard to drinking water, issues which are systematically hidden from the media, for obvious reasons. Prove them wrong, if you can; just don't pretend like these problems don't exist. When you read something that proclaims the purity of tap water or the importance of fluoride, maybe now you will notice how studies are claimed but never cited. Look behind what you read and try to see the persuasive tactics of Freud's nephew. Appreciate the mastery of an art.

The physiological importance of hydration has really been glossed over by doctors and nutritionists, not on purpose, but simply because it's not taught. The ideas of Dr. Batmanghelidj must be confronted - either he's right or else there's a major gap in our health information.

It's unfortunate that the sludge of politics has to be hauled into a discussion of water purity. But once you discover how and why our water got this way, the political influences are like an elephant in the living room - pretty hard to ignore. Not exactly hot news; politics has been controlling science ever since they locked Galileo in that high-rise jail for discovering the earth went around the sun. Which is why you shouldn't expect much support if you try to discuss or substantiate what you've just learned in this chapter. Lemmings know what lemmings are told.

The rest of the iceberg is left to you. This chapter is just the briefest glimpse of the top part. With a little follow-up, perhaps you won't make the same mistake the captain of the Titanic made: thinking that there's nothing in the water that can hurt you.

shiloh777777@yahoo.com

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