TAKE THE PARENTS AGAINST FLUORIDATION PLEDGE Why take the Parents Pledge? For over six decades the promoters of fluoridation have insisted that swallowing fluoride was good for children. Nothing could be further from the truth. But far too few citizens, media persons and decision-makers know this and the mythology persists. It is more urgent than ever that parents learn the following truths about this dangerous and foolish practice and work together to end it. 1) Nature has kept fluoride away from babies. If babies needed fluoride for healthy teeth or any other tissue Nature would have put a significant amount in mothers’ milk. It did not. The level of fluoride in mothers’ milk is incredibly low (0.004 ppm, NRC, 2006, p.40). The shocking result is that a bottle-fed baby in a fluoridated community (with fluoride concentrations ranging from 0.7 to 1.2 ppm) gets between 175 to 300 times more fluoride than nature intended! 2) The recklessness of this measure is becoming visible. 41% of American children aged 12-15 have some form of visible damage to their tooth enamel called dental fluorosis (see the pictures at fluoridealert.org/issues/fluorosis/) . This condition means that those afflicted have been over-exposed to fluoride. 3) Fluoride has the potential to damage the brain. Incredibly, there have now been 37 studies that indicate that fluoride is associated with a decrease in children’s IQ and in some studies at very modest levels (e.g. 1.8 ppm) (see FluorideAlert.org/issues/health/brain and Landrigan and Grandjean, 2014). There is simply no margin of safety to protect all our children from this serious risk when they are forced to drink fluoride at 0.7 ppm (the new level proposed for fluoridation programs in the U.S. by the DHHS). The average drop in IQ in 26 out of 27 studies reviewed by a Harvard team was 7 IQ points (Choi et al., 2012). 4) The evidence of any benefit is very weak. Why are our children forced to take these risks? According to fluoridation promoters it is to lower tooth decay, but according to the World Health Organizations data, tooth decay has been coming down as fast – if not faster – in non-fluoridated countries as fluoridated ones (fluoridealert.org/issues/caries/who-data/ ). In addition, the largest survey of tooth decay ever carried out in the US found no statistically significant difference in tooth decay between those children who had spent all their lives in a fluoridated community and those in a non-fluoridated community (Brunelle and Carlos, 1990). These surprising observations are probably best explained by the fact that even promoters of fluoridation now admit that the predominant benefit of fluoride – if any - is topical not systemic (CDC, 1999, 2001). 5) Common sense says that if fluoride works on the outside of the tooth, not from inside the body, it is silly to swallow fluoride and expose every tissue in the body – including the brain - to a known toxic substance. Furthermore, with fluoridated toothpaste readily available, this CDC admission removes the whole rational for forcing fluoridation on people who don’t want it. If you are a parent or grandparent we invite you to become a founding member of the Parents Against Fluoridation campaign and help recruit more - many more – to do likewise. To do this, simply add your name(s) to the statement below:
Posted on: Fri, 18 Jul 2014 16:18:34 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015