RFK Jr v Fluoride

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Hi, Jules and Jez here.

And every week on Not Stupid, we unpack the news of the week.

From the stuff that matters to the stories you're obsessed with.

That whole idea if you're going to like have a lie, have a big lie.

It's just a big.

And stick to it.

And so big that, like, I was having tea with a king last week and, well, you check with him you ask him that's what he said to me

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we're going to do a little audience participation exercise ready

will everybody in the audience please run the tip of his tongue over his teeth just to get into the spirit of the story please and what do you find

anything wrong

I'm hoping that you have perfectly fine teeth, but in 1941, when the US government made this film, most people didn't.

Bridge work?

Missing teeth?

That's what I thought.

Yeah, I can't stress how bad teeth used to be.

They were so bad that it was actually often better just to not have them at all.

As a 21st birthday present from his family, my grandfather got all of his teeth removed and dentures put in.

This was pretty common.

It was also a popular wedding present for brides.

Take this in a hurry, gentlemen.

Like almost everybody else, he has decayed teeth.

Anyway, four years after this health film was released, the city of Grand Rapids, Michigan started putting fluoride in its water.

That quickly spread across the U.S.

and around the developed world, and the rate of dental decay has plummeted, saving billions in dental costs.

And yet here is the U.S.

Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F.

Kennedy Jr., celebrating the state of Utah taking fluoride out of its water.

The

evidence against fluoride is overwhelming.

It causes IQ loss.

It causes osteoarthritis.

Bobby's on a mission to make America healthy again, and step one is getting the fluoride out of the water.

The more fluoride you get, the higher levels in

your drinking water, your urine,

the more likely it is you will lose IQ and also other neurological injuries like ADHD.

RFK Jr.

is accused of using ChatGPT to help him write his Make America Healthy Again report and accused of basing his conclusions on non-existent or discredited studies.

And yet he has successfully convinced two states to ban fluoridated water.

what actually is the deal with fluoride in the water?

All my life I've been drinking it and yet I've also been hearing people tell me that it's going to make me sick and other nasty things.

I've been diving into this topic and it's actually fascinating.

It tells us a lot about where the discredited and pseudo-scientific ideas driving the policies of the Trump administration have come from.

I'm Matt Bevan, and this is If You're Listening.

Well,

now that we've taken inventory of our own teeth, let's go on with the story.

In the early 20th century, we actually had a pretty good idea of what was causing all the problems with our teeth.

Don't use your teeth for cracking nuts, or, worse yet, as a bottle opener.

It's dental suicide, brother.

Okay, yes, there's that, but also the main problem is this.

The mouth is full of bacteria, some of which feed, live, and multiply on those carbohydrates, forming an acid which eats through the enamel into the dentine.

Cutting back on sugar consumption helps a little, but honestly, I think I'd rather have all my teeth ripped out than stop eating sugar.

So, while these dentists were working hard to solve the problem of tooth decay, in other parts of America, dentists were working hard to solve a completely different problem altogether.

Frederick McKay was a dentist who moved to the city of Colorado Springs in 1901.

And as he started to meet the locals, he discovered something very strange.

Almost everyone who had grown up in Colorado Springs had brown teeth.

The teeth have mottling over most of the surface.

He gave this mysterious condition a delightful name, the Colorado brown stain.

It took him 30 more years to figure out what was causing it.

He's been ingesting too much fluoride over at least six to seven years.

Fluorine is in the top right hand corner of the periodic table and it's not an exotic element.

It's more common in the Earth's crust than coal and it seeps into water supplies all over the world.

Colorado Springs had particularly high levels of fluorine.

But on the surface of their brown mottled teeth, Mackay noticed something interesting.

The people with Colorado brown stain or flirrus as it became known didn't have any tooth decay.

The enamel was stronger.

So he thought, what if there was a sweet spot, a fluoride balance where you get the decay protection, but without the stain?

And it turns out that there is, and it's really not all that much.

The addition of fluoride in minute quantities around one part per million to the water we drink is not only harmless but will prevent tooth decay in children.

One part per million.

It's an amount so tiny that it's kind of impossible to comprehend, but it's basically like throwing a shot glass full of fluoride into a family swimming pool and then swooshing it around.

So one American city decided that they would engage in a bit of an experiment.

Grand Rapids fight against tooth decay started in January 1945 when fluoride was added to the water supply.

After six years of fluoridation, the study shows that the six-year-old children who drank the water from birth had 65% less tooth decay.

It was an incredible result.

Other studies show the benefits of fluoridation will last throughout life.

In some places where there was already fluoride in the water, you just had to filter it out until there was only one shot glass per pool.

In places with not enough fluoride, adding it was astonishingly cheap.

Fluoride was already manufactured in large quantities as a byproduct of fertilizer and aluminium production.

In a town of 5,000 population, the daily amount of the fluoride compound used and its cost is

$1.61.

So you've got an effective medication that you can supply to everyone in a town for pocket change.

So it's basically a win-win for public health.

What could possibly go wrong?

This, they claim, can cut tooth decay by as much as 50 to 60 percent.

Yet the fluoridation of water supplies has become the most bitterly contested public health measure of our time.

Fantastic.

The first large Australian town to introduce fluoride was Yass in New South Wales in 1956.

The Yass fluoridation scheme was proposed by a doctor and a dentist who were both municipal councillors.

By 1963, Yass had seen positive results similar to Grand Rapids, Michigan.

I will say that my children's teeth are in very good condition.

I think it's unquestionably the only thing to do.

I only wish we'd had fluoridated water when I was small.

But the dentist who proposed it, Sid Dobbin, got a lot more than he bargained for.

We have letters from all over Australia telling us that we're spreading communism via the water tap.

Hang on, communism in the water supply?

All this time we were worried about a red under the bed when really the threat was a pinko in the cinco.

This comes from everywhere, all parts of Australia, and the other side of the world too, as a matter of fact.

Accusing the dentists of yas of spreading communism is a very odd accusation, so let's figure out what exactly was going on there.

Throughout the 1950s, a large and diverse network of people had formed in the United States that you would think would have nothing in common.

It included the ultra-right-wing John Burch Society, the Ku Klux Klan, and chiropractors.

Alongside this ragtag team were people who were selling vitamin supplements and other natural health remedies, and of course, anti-vaxes.

The only things these incredibly different groups could agree on, basically, was that they were skeptical of the medical establishment.

and they didn't like the idea of mandatory government health care.

To most of them, it was a civil liberties issue, not a public health issue.

And even in YAS, people did have sympathy for their argument.

I do think the people who complain about an infringement of their rights have a point.

They have no say.

There's no other water to drink here.

But for most of them, the dental benefits outweigh the civil liberty costs.

I'm prepared to go along with it because I feel the benefits are so outstanding for the children.

But if it came to a question of adding something else to the water, I'd think very, very carefully about it.

That's really the thing.

If we let the government put fluoride in the water, what's next?

But most people are like this lady in Yass.

They're not going to go to the barricades over fluoride being the hammer and sickle in the trickle.

Despite the threat of liquid communism, by 1979, Australia was the world leader in fluoridation, with two-thirds of the population drinking it in their water supply.

But there were lingering concerns about potential negative health effects.

In the 1970s, there were lots of very recent examples of dangers being kept secret by elaborate cover-ups.

The use of asbestos has now become so widespread that more than 3,000 everyday products are made from it.

Has the British announcement that smoking is a cause of lung cancer had any effect on your sales of cigarettes?

I didn't really need to take the lithonide, but it was recommended by a doctor and well you don't question your doctor.

He suggested it and I took it.

So could fluoride be yet another example of this?

The ABC's Four Corners program decided to investigate.

The way those opposing fluoride see it, and there is literal truth in what they say, a highly toxic poison is being added to the water we drink.

ABC reporter Charles Bulley went through every possible argument against putting fluoride in the water, no matter how easily debunked.

He talked to every crackpot he could find, including this biochemist who thinks that the fertilizer and aluminium industries had tricked us into drinking their toxic byproducts.

So they're being exported to places like Tasmania where they get detoxicated through the citizens' kidneys.

So in fact, we're solving a waste disposal problem by using human receptacles.

That was not true at all.

Neither was this.

Dr.

Burke appeared on television in Holland and told an audience of millions that compulsory fluoridation was a form of mass murder.

And now this guy was going to make the same argument to millions of Australians.

According to Dr.

Burke, the figures show that 40,000 Americans die of cancer every year as a result of drinking fluoridated water.

Dr.

Burke's figures were based on the increase in cancer rates in American cities with fluoride versus American cities without fluoride between 1950 and 1970.

But the figures didn't account for any other possible cause of cancer rates increasing, like say the population getting older or the rate of smoking.

By the time Four Corners ran this story, Dr.

Burke's research had been widely debunked and discredited.

Dr.

Burke is not a statistician.

In fact, anybody with any statistical training would laugh at the crudeness of their analysis.

But the ABC didn't interview any other cancer experts, including the Australian Cancer Council, which had thoroughly rejected Burke's report.

The ABC didn't mention this though, instead saying, When experts disagree, the public are left to form their own conclusions.

In the process, people might simply believe the worst.

Hmm, they might.

After all, that is generally how the news works.

Just tell people every possible scenario and let them figure it out for themselves what could go wrong.

Particularly if you offer them a case study of a woman being poisoned by fluoride.

Mouth had ulcers that turned a greeny grey and ulcers all ran my tongue and then we moved down a bit lower, had respiratory trouble.

I was feeding my baby, had a lot of sores and lumps in my breasts.

She was diagnosed with fluoride poisoning and the symptoms went away when she moved out of Melbourne and started drinking tap water.

There is a likelihood that she's much more sensitive to fluoride than most of the population.

The other unusual thing is that she drinks a lot of water, in excess of 10 litres a day.

I mean that's just too much water.

People have died from water intoxication after drinking less than that.

The one shot glass per pool dosage is not designed for people who are drinking water by the bucket full.

Does fluoride offer us a choice between a good set of teeth or dental decay?

Or do we run the risk of the much worse options of fluoride poisoning and perhaps even cancer?

No, you don't.

You really don't.

The medical community was furious about the ABC's report.

One aspect of our report on fluoridation touched on a possible link between fluoride and the incidence of cancer in America.

The Australian Cancer Council has claimed that those findings are erroneous.

But the damage was done.

Several local councils, including in the New South Wales town of Nowra, switched off the fluoride.

The Councillor's decision followed very closely on the screening of an ABC Four Corners program, which dealt with an alleged link between cancer and fluoride.

The Council put the question of fluoride to a referendum.

It became a bitter battle.

The New South Wales Health Commission has strongly backed the pro-fluoride camp, as has every major health institution in Australia.

Dr.

Burke, the fluoride cancer guy, sent his partner to help out the anti-fluoride group.

I have read the garbage put out by the pro-fluoridationists in the media here in Australia.

And quite frankly, I don't know whether the laws exist here in Australia, but these people should be put away and put away for a long time.

The pro-fluoride people weren't locked up, and they won the referendum with 57% of the vote.

Now, a win is a win, sure, but 57% isn't a blowout.

In fact, in similar referendums held across Australia and the United States, all of the votes ended up being really close.

And winning by a narrow margin on a subject like this still leaves you with a sizable proportion of your population fearing their next cup of tea.

And fear like that, fear of the government doing things that harm you, either through malevolence or incompetence, well, that's exactly what leads to the rise of people like this guy.

I think fluoride is a poison.

This is RFK Jr.

speaking last year, just before being named as Donald Trump's pick for U.S.

Health Secretary.

Let's see what he has to say about this.

It's a toxic byproduct of a certain chemical process, an oil industry process.

I mean, yes, that part is true.

And for many years, those industries, it was costing them thousands of dollars per drum to get rid of.

Nope, that is entirely made up.

And then they came up with the idea, why don't we put it in the water supply?

That is a lie.

And they did that, and it causes cancers.

Of course it causes your bones to deteriorate and it causes severe IQ loss.

There's still no evidence it causes cancer but it does cause your bones to deteriorate and it causes IQ loss

when consumed in massive doses.

But all medications will cause problems if you take too much.

Eating too many cruciferous vegetables can cause thyroid cancer.

Yes, you can OD on broccoli.

I should say RFK Jr.

isn't arguing that fluoride doesn't help your teeth.

He's arguing that we should rub it on our teeth, not drink it.

We now know that virtually all the benefit is from topical and we can get that through mouthwashes, we can get through fluoridated toothpastes.

For a lot of people, this argument will satisfy them.

After all, most people these days are running their tongue over a full set of healthy teeth.

Why risk cancer and IQ loss when my teeth are fine?

Republican Congressman Mike Simpson, a former practicing dentist, is skeptical.

If you are successful in banning fluoride, I noticed you congratulated Utah and Florida, I think, for banning it.

That's up to them.

They can do what they want.

But we better put a lot more money into dental education because we're going to need a whole lot more dentists.

And they better start training them now.

It'll only take a few years before the rates of cavities start to increase.

That won't be Bobby Kennedy's problem, of course.

He'll be gone by then.

But look, fluoride in the water isn't worth going to the barricades over.

There are guidelines for what people can do to get enough fluoride in areas without fluoridated water.

But the fight over fluoridation is really indicative of a broader issue.

This is essentially a culture war that has morphed into a scientific debate.

Some folks didn't like the idea of governments supplying medication, and so they came up with a bunch of scientific-sounding scare campaigns.

In this case, it seems like the U.S.

Department of Health and Human Services has been using AI to cook some of those up out of thin air.

And it's these sorts of scare campaigns that make people fearful of vaccinations or wind turbines.

But why let facts get in the way of a crusade?

That could be the tagline for 2025.

If you're listening, is written by me, Matt Bevan.

Supervising producer is Cara Jensen-McKinnon.

Audio production is by Cinnamon Nippard.

Next, the Australian government has approved an extension to a gas extraction project that will last until 2070, while at the same time promising to achieve net zero emissions by 2050.

It's a tricky thing to understand from an Australian perspective, but that's because we're not the ones who are going to be using that gas.

For about a century, Japan has been the most most important customer for Australia's resources.

When they say jump, we ask how high.

So why does Japan have so much influence over our gas market?

And could we turn the tables?

That's next.

On if you're listening.

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