How Essential Is Fluoride?

What do the Experts Say?

Guy P. D. Armstrong

• Publisher: The Nameless Publisher
• eBook ISBN: 9780473510190
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Dentistry

What Do The Experts Say?

And just as importantly What do they NOT say?

This book argues that experts have consistently exaggerated in their claim that fluorine should be considered an essential element for humans and suggests reasons why.

Expert focus on fluorine has detracted from the importance of elements and compounds that are definitely essential in the growth of teeth. In 2017 Guy Armstrong spent six months in the New Zealand Health Department archives looking through the fluoridation files of the 1950s. This has given his work a unique aspect which makes it very relevant to countries with F added to their public water supply.

A number of countries have been under the influence of American expertise and under the influence of the pervasive bias he shows. Any reader with a basic interest in science and health will be fascinated by this comprehensive account.

Media have consistently reported poorly on the fluoridation issue, partly because they did not want to be abused. This book looks at some very detailed aspects of expert and media interaction and behaviour, notably the presupposition of "objectivity" which allows the quoting of experts while disclaiming any responsibility to point out contradictions, and not ask uncomfortable or even obvious questions, when an evidence-based attitude would suggest this acceptable.

This book will help journalists, city councillors and the public understand not only the exaggeration of essentiality but the reasons behind it. The role of the sugar, aluminium and toothpaste industries are explored. The public relations industry has a presence here.

Contains six chapters, many sub-chapters, a detailed reference section, nine appendices, and an index.

I can also happily announce that finally an ebook is available!

1. Is Fluorine/Fluoride an Essential Nutrient?

How do we test if something is an essential nutrient? Just what is an essential nutrient, anyway? This of course is a technical question, in that it means different things to different people, as you will see. I apologise if this is feels like an obtuse answer. Whether it should be something necessary or something beneficial is a cornerstone of this work. A far more important cornerstone of this work is how conclusions of necessity and benefit are treated in public, compared to how they are treated in scientific and more obscure and influential documents. Some definitions of common terms are given prior to Chapter 1 .

How do we test if something is an essential nutrient? This question has been addressed by three people I will mention here. Full documentation and citations are given in the text.

On the 14^th of October, 2013, an “expert panel from the University of Waikato” appeared on a Google Hangout. This is an online group discussion filmed with interaction from the public, who could ask questions through social media. I don’t think it received much media attention; it may have been drowned out because this was near the time New Zealand’s city of Hamilton, Waikato, was embroiled in fluoridation arguments.

A viewer asked if fluorine was “essential” or “beneficial”. The experts discussed the question. Regarding specific criteria, Dr. Mucalo, Senior Lecturer in physical chemistry told viewers:

“Yes, you need to design very careful experiments to specifically exclude fluoride from the diet before you could categorically prove whether it was or was not an essential element, and I think they’ve done that for things like silicon, where they’ve tried to prove whether it was essential for the diet but you’d have to do very excrutiatingly careful experiments to do that, so… at this stage I don’t know whether anyone’s done that yet.” [1]

Many people have attempted such experiments.

Most of the experiments I have collected here have been cited in work like the American National Academy of Sciences and the World Health Organization, but also writings of people supportive of, and opposed to fluoridation.

In 2007, the National Academy of Sciences published a document which cited the 8^th edition of a textbook called Essentials of Medical Geology, published in 2005. The sixth chapter is called Biological Functions of the Elements. It begins by looking at what constitutes an essential element. Author Ulf Lindh, Senior Researcher at the Biology Education Centre, Uppsala University in Sweden, says definitions have provoked much discussion, and that the earliest was borrowed from protein chemistry.

To paraphrase: the element should be present in living tissues in a reasonably constant concentration, it should cause problems – “anomalies in several species” when removed, and these anomalies should be corrected upon reinstatement of the element.

Lindh proposes the “current” (1998) definition:

“An element is considered essential to an organism when reduction of its exposure below a certain limit results consistently in a reduction in a physiologically important function, or when the element is an integral part of an organic structure performing a vital function in the organism.” [2]

Lindh notes problems associated with proving necessity and ascertaining exact requirements. Further into Chapter 1 we will see it is nearly impossible to completely remove fluorine from a diet. Reduction of only one element is difficult in food preparation - fluorine is apparently not the only element difficult to remove. Removal and reduction of one element may effect uptake of others leading to ambiguity of results.

Detection is also sometimes difficult. In terms of knowledge regarding necessary trace elements, we can be more certain about animal needs than human needs. Lindh doesn’t say it, but this is probably true for toxic effects and upper limitations of tolerance as well. In a section called The Functional Value of Trace Elements he writes:

“The paramount function is to be necessary for the structure and function of significant biomolecules, mainly enzymes.”

All of the experiments in the first chapter have tested fluorine’s essentiality on rodents. They have largely adhered to this criteria in terms of experimental design and intent, though some have used more or less imaginative, precise, and technological methods than others. This leads to the question of “how well can these be applied to humans?”

In Chapter 6 , I discuss the ‘for and against’ arguments that have been given with regard to using conclusions of rodent experiments on humans, and look at some human experiments. Relevant here may be a sentence from the World Health Organization’s 1970 monograph, Fluoride and Human Health:

“Where fluoride data for man are unavailable, corollary studies on experimental animals are presented.” [3]

Regarding experiments, I obtained almost every one I, or someone who had written on the subject, thought relevant. I also quoted from reviews that simply observed and critiqued experiments already in the literature. I feel we are quite lucky in this regard, because in cases of opposition or promotion, scientists seemed quite open about it, and none seemed set in stone regarding their conclusions, though a few were a little persistent. The reader will be pleased to note that there is almost no difference of opinion in terms of conclusion regarding individual experimentation in ‘pro’ or ‘anti’ literature with a couple of small exceptions, yet the overall conclusion – the ‘yes, no or maybe’ answer to the title of this chapter, is varied and nuanced, depending on the person to whom we go.

Different people have different criteria for what constitutes dietary essentiality. What I have quoted from Dr. Mucalo and Dr. Lindh is best termed “traditional,” maybe even “standard” – I will introduce other criteria throughout, notably “prevention” and “benefit” have both been suggested.

Read through these experiments slowly and patiently. Some have concluded fluorine to be essential, while others have not.

These are mainly primary sources, meaning original experiments, though there are a couple of exceptions. I have avoided reviews for the most part until the next chapter, although if they have comments neglected by others that help enlighten understanding of experiments, these have been included.

I have kept to a reasonably chronological order. When a sequence of conclusions has been argued over for many years, for the sake of convenience I have given them breathing room before going back to the main stream of research. Please consider some disagreements take a long time to work through, some are argued about then forgotten, and some criticisms may simply be ignored.

Usually the researchers create diets that are as low as possible in fluoride, and add differing levels of fluoride to the rats’ drinking water, or use foods with defined amounts.

Lindh’s and Mucalo’s discussions are very similar to what Drs. Messer, Armstrong and Singer from the University of Minneapolis wrote in a 1973 paper regarding two of their experiments that attempted the reduction of fluorine in the diets of mice.

“A specific deficiency state should be produced by a diet lacking the element in question, but which is otherwise adequate and satisfactory.”

“The deficiency should be prevented or cured by addition to the diet of that element alone.” [4]

This is what I will call “Messer’s first criterion”. I don’t know if the words originated in his mind, but I will attribute it to him because another scientist did so in a 1974 presentation. In the text I will refer to the set of four papers in the early 1970s by this group as being by either Messer et al. or Armstrong et al.

The statement quoted is from 1973. I will introduce many experiments before that year, but it should be understood that this criterion is what all of these experiments have aimed for, though they had different ways of doing so.

Because of nuances in methods, one cannot simply “count the number of times a particular conclusion appears” and claim “one conclusion wins”. This is shortsighted and presumptuous, as will be shown.

Obviously conclusive strength depends on a myriad of factors. I will discuss individual aims, methods, results and conclusions of each experiment. Chapter 1.2 will elaborate on some of these, and introduce more.

As far back as the 1800s researchers were considering the question of fluoride’s essentiality. Dr. Gerald Cox, writing in a 1952 National Academy of Sciences publication, pointed out that before the year 1933, accuracy regarding analysis of fluoride was poor. In his words “little reliance can be placed on any quantitative analyses for fluorine reported” [5] before Willard and Winter’s 1933 method of isolation by distillation. I point this out because I show a couple of experiments and papers before this date, and I do not want you to feel that the conclusions of an experiment done almost a century ago should be set in stone. Each experiment should be viewed in and of itself. Some yield plenty of information on their own, others more when compared with the rest.

1.1 What Do Scientists Who Performed Animal Experiments Say?

In 1933, the Journal of Nutrition published an experiment [6] by George Sharpless and E. V. McCollum from the School of Hygiene and Public Health, at the Johns Hopkins University of Baltimore. They stated at the beginning of their experiment that the question of fluoride’s essentiality was unanswered. The purpose of their experiment was to test if nutritional requirements can be satisfied with diets containing as little fluoride as possible. Ten rats, five of each gender, were fed a low fluoride ration, while another three of each gender were f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Definitions
• Glossary
• 1. Is Fluorine/Fluoride an Essential Nutrient?
• 2. What Do Experts Say about a Nutritional Role for Fluorine/Fluoride?
• 3. What did Experts in New Zealand Say?
• 4. How Abundant is Fluoride in Food?
• 5. What Do the Experts Say in Newspapers and the Media?
• 6. Relating Animal Work to Humans, Research on Humans, and a Bigger Picture of Tooth Decay
• 7. Conclusion
• 8. References
• Appendix 1. Media articles from Chapter 5.1
• Index