Fluoride: Poison on Tap

Behold, I will give my covenant of peace… and pure water shall not fail. — a paraphrase of Numbers 25:12 and Isaiah 58:11

Pure Water Shall Not Fail

The first thing you put into your body every morning is water. Before the coffee, before the toast, before the first email.

If you are like most Americans, the water comes from the kitchen tap. It is technically safe, which is a phrase worth reading twice. It has been processed at a municipal facility, chlorinated to kill bacteria, and in most communities fluoridated according to federal recommendations, then delivered to you through pipes that may or may not contain lead, depending on the age of your house. The water authority has tested it and certified that it meets the legal standard. But the legal standard does not regulate most of the compounds that have entered the water supply in the last fifty years: pharmaceutical residues, agricultural chemicals, industrial byproducts, the breakdown products of plastics. What the rulebook does not ask about, the test does not find.

And two substances are added on purpose. The first is chlorine, which is added to kill bacteria. Chlorine has a real public health success behind it, and I will tell its story in Chapter 3. The second is fluoride, which is added because the dental establishment decided in the 1940s and 1950s that the population needed to be medicated for tooth decay through the public water supply. Nobody asked for your signature. No federal law requires it; each state or town decides. But for most of the last eighty years, most American towns have said yes.

The verse at the head of this chapter is a paraphrase of two biblical passages, because the Hebrew Bible has a great deal to say about pure water and almost nothing to say about the modern chemical contaminants we are about to discuss. The biblical writers assumed water was water. They did not know that one day a generation would have to filter its own drinking water in its own homes because the water that came from the tap had been deliberately adulterated with substances the body has no use for. They would have found the situation absurd. They would have asked what kind of civilization does this to its own drinking water. The question is worth asking, and it is worth asking out loud.

In this chapter I want to teach you what fluoride is, how it got into the water, what my teacher on this subject, the neurosurgeon Dr. Russell Blaylock, says it does in the body, why it pairs so badly with aluminum, where it hides besides the tap, how mainstream science has shifted in the last few years, and the practical steps that take it out of a family’s life. It is the first of the everyday toxins in this book, and one of the easiest to fix. Good news up front, for once.

A History You Have Not Been Taught

I want to begin with the history, because the fluoride story is the most instructive case I know of how industrial waste came to be added to the public water supply under cover of a public health benefit. If you ever wanted a master class in rebranding, here it is.

The story begins in the 1930s, in the aluminum industry. Aluminum production at the time was generating large quantities of fluoride waste, which was both highly toxic and very difficult to dispose of safely. The aluminum companies, particularly the Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa), were facing increasing legal liability from communities near their plants. The fluoride was leaking into groundwater, killing cattle, damaging crops, and producing documented health effects in people living downwind of the smelters. Lawsuits were beginning to be filed. The industry needed a solution, and a dumpster was not going to cut it.

The solution that emerged, over the late 1930s and 1940s, was a public-relations and scientific campaign to reposition fluoride from a toxic industrial waste into a public health benefit. Same substance, new outfit. The campaign was directed in significant part by Edward Bernays, the public relations pioneer whose 1928 book Propaganda is one of the foundational texts of the field. (Yes, he really called it that.) Bernays understood, perhaps better than anyone of his generation, how to shape public opinion through seemingly independent authorities (scientists, doctors, dentists, public health officials) who could be persuaded to advance a position that served the underlying commercial interest. If you remember the “follow the money” test from Chapter 1, you will see it at work here.

The campaign targeted dentistry. A handful of studies in the 1930s and early 1940s had observed that people in regions where the natural water contained fluoride had fewer cavities. The studies were observational. They did not establish causation. They did not adequately control for other factors. They did not consider the effects of swallowing fluoride for a lifetime on the bone, the thyroid, the pineal gland or the kidneys. But they were enough to give a scientific veneer to the campaign that followed, and a thin coat of veneer was all the campaign needed.

In 1945, Grand Rapids, Michigan, became the first American city to add fluoride to its drinking water, to reduce cavities. By 1960, dozens of major cities had followed. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention later named water fluoridation one of the ten great public health achievements of the twentieth century. For most of that century, questioning it was dismissed as a fringe position, filed somewhere next to the flat-earth crowd. By the time the documentary Fluoride: Poison on Tap was made in 2015, about three-quarters of Americans on community water systems were receiving fluoridated water. The film traces how fluoride came to be added to American water in 1945, its earlier commercial use as an insect and rat poison, and the scientists and families who now question it.

What is being added to the water today is not the calcium fluoride that occurs naturally in some springs and wells. It is hydrofluorosilicic acid or sodium fluorosilicate, captured from the smokestack scrubbers of phosphate fertilizer plants and sold to water authorities, who pay for it with public funds and pump it into the drinking water. Read that again: the waste gets sold, not hauled away. Dr. Richard Schulze, the herbalist you met in Chapter 1, speaks of “added fluoride made from waste aluminum.” The two accounts fit together: the campaign began with the aluminum industry’s waste, and today most of the fluoride comes from the fertilizer industry’s waste. Either way, it is a toxic industrial byproduct that has been repurposed as a public health measure.

Dr. Blaylock, whom you also met in Chapter 1 and whose work on excitotoxins fills Chapter 7, has warned for decades that the trade-off was never worth it. He has carried that warning to the conference of the Fluoride Action Network. In his 2004 report “Why Fluoride Is Toxic,” in The Blaylock Wellness Report, he put the heart of the matter plainly:

“But at certain levels it will accumulate in your brain and can lead to a form of degeneration.” — Russell L. Blaylock, M.D.

I will not try to give you a full review of the fluoride literature in this chapter; it would need a book of its own, and there are good ones. The reader who wants to go deeper should read Christopher Bryson’s The Fluoride Deception and Dr. Paul Connett’s The Case Against Fluoride, both of which document the history and the science with great care. What I want you to take from this section is the basic shape of what happened. An industrial waste product was added to the public water supply under the cover of a public health benefit, by a campaign of public relations and selective science, beginning eighty years ago. It is still being added today. The reader who drinks fluoridated tap water is taking a measurable dose of it every day, and it is accumulating in her bones, her teeth, her thyroid gland, her pineal gland and her brain.

The practical instruction is simple. Filter your water. We will get to the specifics at the end of this chapter, so hold your shopping cart until then.

Fluoride and the Developing Brain

Now I want to tell you what fluoride does once it is inside the body, and I want to begin where Dr. Blaylock begins: with the babies.

Dr. Blaylock’s greatest concern is for babies and children, whose brains are growing fastest.

“In humans, for example, the most rapid brain growth and development occur in the last three months of pregnancy and the first two years after birth.” — Dr. Blaylock

Hold on to that sentence. The last three months of pregnancy and the first two years after birth are the window a mother most wants to protect, and they are the window in which fluoride does the most harm. As a mother of seven, I want every young mother to have this information, plainly and without the fine print.

Dr. Blaylock leans on the work of others to make the case:

• Dr. Phyllis Mullenix’s animal studies. Dr. Mullenix, a toxicologist, found that fluoride levels in the brains of her lab animals rose the longer they drank fluoridated water, and their behavior changed. Fluoride did not pass through and leave like a polite guest; it built up in the brain over time. And the animals’ blood levels matched those of humans drinking water at the EPA’s allowed limit.
• The IQ studies. Dr. Blaylock cites Chinese studies showing roughly a 10-point drop in IQ among children in high-fluoride areas. Studies in the 1990s and 2000s, in China, Mexico, India and elsewhere, found the same direction. The 2012 Harvard meta-analysis by Choi, Sun, Zhang and Grandjean, published in Environmental Health Perspectives, reviewed twenty-seven studies and found a consistent pattern of lower cognitive scores in children exposed to higher fluoride levels. Different countries, different decades, same arrow.
• Soy formula. Dr. Blaylock warns especially about soy formula, which combines fluoride with other brain toxins: “Soy-based formula has very high levels of these brain toxins, and a baby’s brain is the most vulnerable until the age of two years.” Formula mixed with fluoridated tap water adds even more on top.

That last point is the one I most want young mothers to hear, because a bottle-fed baby’s whole diet may be mixed from the tap, and every bottle mixed with fluoridated water carries fluoride. A pregnant woman who is planning to bottle-feed with soy formula and tap water does not need to be frightened. She needs the information. She can take Dr. Blaylock’s concern about soy formula and fluoride to her midwife or doctor and talk through the options together. I tell you how I would mix a baby’s bottle at the end of this chapter.

A Dangerous Pair: Fluoride and Aluminum

The warning I most want you to remember from this chapter is this one. If you keep only one page, keep this one.

“The combination of fluoride and aluminum is so toxic that even in concentrations half those added to drinking water will cause severe destruction of critical brain cells.” — Dr. Blaylock

Fluoride is harmful to the brain alone. Fluoride together with aluminum, Dr. Blaylock teaches, is far worse, and at very low levels. Think of them as two troublemakers who are bad enough apart and much worse in the same room.

Where does the aluminum come from? It comes into the modern home from aluminum cookware, aluminum foil, cans, antacids, antiperspirants, and some medications and vaccines. It also comes in the teacup, as you will see below, because the tea plant pulls both fluoride and aluminum from the soil. (So much for the innocent cup of tea.) Dr. Blaylock links the fluoride and aluminum combination with Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS).

This is why, when I teach a family to lower its fluoride, I teach it to lower its aluminum at the same time. The two belong on the same list. If you were to explain this to a friend in the grocery store, somewhere between the cereal and the canned goods, you might say it in three sentences: a brain surgeon warns that fluoride and aluminum together are especially hard on brain cells, even at low levels; fluoride comes from tap water and tea, and aluminum from foil, cans and some antacids; so I filter my water and cook in stainless steel or cast iron. Aluminum and the other heavy metals are taught in full in Chapter 4.

The Pineal Gland, the Bones and the Thyroid

I said that fluoride accumulates in the bones, the thyroid, the pineal gland and the brain. Here is what Dr. Blaylock teaches about each of the first three.

The pineal gland and sleep. Dr. Blaylock reports the research of Dr. Jennifer Luke, who found fluoride concentrating in the pineal gland at levels far higher than in the rest of the brain. Why does that matter to anyone staring at the ceiling in the small hours?

“The pineal gland is the source of the very important hormone melatonin, the same hormone sold in health food stores to aid in sleep.” — Dr. Blaylock

A great many of the women I work with cannot sleep. I want them to know where the hormone of sleep is made, and what has been quietly settling there.

The bones.

“When fluoride accumulates in bones it stimulates the bone-generating cells, known as osteoblasts, to over-produce bone calcium in what are commonly known as bony overgrowths or bone spurs.” — Dr. Blaylock

As a neurosurgeon, Dr. Blaylock operated on hundreds of people with spinal stenosis, a narrowing of the spinal canal that this kind of bony overgrowth can cause. He also cites higher hip fracture rates in fluoridated communities. Here is the paradox to remember: fluoride makes bone denser, but not stronger. Heavier is not the same as sturdier.

The thyroid. Fluoride was once used as a drug to slow an overactive thyroid. That alone should tell us something, and it is not something reassuring to find in a glass of water. Dr. Blaylock continues:

“Subsequent studies have found that fluoride also suppresses the activity of the normal thyroid as well, inducing a condition called hypothyroidism or goiter.” — Dr. Blaylock

So when someone asks you which body systems fluoride affects, you can name them: the developing brain (and, with aluminum, the aging brain), the pineal gland and the sleep it governs, the bones, the teeth, and the thyroid. That is quite a résumé for something sold as good for your teeth. And the thyroid story does not end there, because fluorine has cousins.

The Halogen Family

In the Arukah Method we teach the balance of the halogens. I want you to understand it, because it changes how you think about every glass of water and every shower. Chemistry class, I promise, was never this useful.

Fluorine, chlorine, bromine and iodine belong to the same chemical family, the halogens. They sit in the same column of the periodic table. They have similar structures and similar reactivities, and the body, at the level of its receptors and transport proteins, often cannot tell them apart. A receptor that was designed to hold iodine will, if iodine is not available, take up fluoride or chloride or bromide instead. The wrong halogen sits on the receptor, like a stranger in your reserved seat, and the receptor cannot do its job.

Chemists describe a general rule for the family, sometimes called the halogen displacement law: a lighter halogen can displace a heavier one, but not the reverse. Fluorine, the lightest, can push out chlorine, bromine and iodine. Iodine, the heaviest, can be pushed out by all three of the others and cannot push any of them out in return. In this family, the lightweight always wins the chair.

Why does that matter? Because fluoride, chloride and bromide compete with iodine, which the thyroid needs, and so do the breasts, the ovaries and the prostate. A body flooded with fluoride from the water, chlorine from the tap and the shower, and bromide from bread and flame retardants has a harder time holding on to its iodine. It is a tug-of-war, and iodine is outnumbered.

Bromine is the halogen most people do not know they are taking in. It is not added to water; it comes in through food and furnishings. Potassium bromate has been used for decades as a dough conditioner in American commercial bread, leaving bromide residues in the loaf; the European Union, Canada and China banned it in baking, and the United States has not, although some large bakers have stopped using it. Brominated vegetable oil sat in citrus-flavored sodas for more than fifty years until the FDA banned it in 2024. Fifty years is a long time to keep a seat warm. And the brominated flame retardants used for decades in furniture, mattresses, electronics and children’s pajamas linger in older furniture and in household dust, long after the sales receipt has faded.

I learned the halogen story in my own body. In my thyroid crisis of 2022, which I told you about in the Introduction, decades of fluoride, bromine and chlorine had quietly displaced the iodine my thyroid needed. Iodine itself, how to know your status and how it is restored, is taught in depth in the Arukah Orthomolecular Nutrition course. For this book, the lesson is the other half of the work: filtering your water is not only about removing fluoride. It is about reducing the chronic halogen pressure that has been working against your thyroid for as long as you have been alive.

Does It Even Work, and Where Things Stand Now

All of this might be a price worth weighing if fluoride in the water did what it was promised to do. Dr. Blaylock does not think it does.

“The largest study ever done in this country, involving 39,000 schoolchildren, found no overall reduction in cavities in communities with fluoride in their water.” — Dr. Blaylock

“In fact, cavity rates dramatically fell even before fluoride was added to toothpaste.” — Dr. Blaylock

Cavity rates also fell in the Western European countries that never fluoridated their water. Awkward, if you are selling fluoridation. Many researchers now agree that whatever benefit fluoride has comes mainly from contact with the surface of the teeth, not from swallowing it. Dr. Weston A. Price, the dentist you met in Chapter 1 and whose work returns in Chapter 13, would not have been surprised. The peoples with the best teeth in the world had never seen fluoridated water. They had nutrient-dense traditional diets, and no water authority to thank.

The world is catching up. Since Dr. Blaylock wrote his report, the mainstream has moved in his direction, slowly, the way big ships turn, and I want you to have the details:

• In 2024 the U.S. National Toxicology Program, a unit of the Department of Health and Human Services, concluded, with moderate confidence, that fluoride exposure above 1.5 milligrams per liter is associated with lower IQ in children. That is about twice the level currently targeted in American water.
• In September 2024 a federal judge ruled in Food & Water Watch v. EPA that fluoridation at current U.S. levels poses an unreasonable risk that the EPA must address, under the Toxic Substances Control Act.
• In 2025 Utah and then Florida became the first U.S. states to end community water fluoridation.

The story is moving, slowly, toward acknowledging what the science has been showing for thirty years. Better late than never, though thirty years is very late. The documentary was made in 2015, before any of these three events, so if you watch it, add them to what it tells you.

The conventional view. I want you to be fair to the other side, because your neighbor, your sister or your dentist will bring it to you, probably over dinner. The CDC has called water fluoridation one of the great public health achievements of the twentieth century, and the American Dental Association still supports it. Supporters point out that the U.S. target, 0.7 milligrams per liter, is below the 1.5 milligram level in the National Toxicology Program review. Critics answer that total intake from water, tea, food, toothpaste and formula can add up to much more, especially for a bottle-fed baby, and that a safety margin for the brain should be wide. Share both sides calmly, and let the person in front of you weigh them. Nobody was ever argued into a water filter.

Fluoride Beyond the Tap

Filtering the water is the first step, but water is not the only source of fluoride. Dr. Blaylock names several others, and you will want to know them, because a family that filters its water but drinks a pot of black tea a day has only closed half the door.

• Tea. “All teas contain very high levels of fluoride as well as aluminum.” The tea plant draws both from the soil, and the older leaves, which are used in cheaper teas, hold the most. That puts both halves of the dangerous pair in one cup, bargain-priced.
• Pesticides. “Pesticides, too, are a problem, because they contain cryolite, a compound containing aluminum and fluoride in high concentrations.” Cryolite residue is found on conventionally grown grapes and other produce. Not the kind of extra you want in a fruit bowl.
• Processed foods and drinks made with fluoridated water: sodas, juices from concentrate, reconstituted soups, and formula. The fluoride rides along in every glass and every bowl.
• Toothpaste and dental treatments, especially when children swallow toothpaste, which children, being children, tend to do.
• Some medications that contain fluorine in their structure.

So a typical home may take in fluoride from the tap, the kettle, the teapot, the soda in the refrigerator, the juice made from concentrate, the grapes in the fruit bowl, the toothpaste on the bathroom sink, the baby’s bottle, and the medicine cabinet. When you walk through a house looking for fluoride, walk through all of those places. Bring the candle.

Dr. Schulze reminds us that tap water carries “added chlorine and other disinfectants, added fluoride made from waste aluminum,” as well as industrial and farm pollutants. His advice is practical, and I love it for its gentleness: “Just do the best you can and drink chemical-free and bacteria-free water.”

A Household Plan for Fluoride

Here is what I teach a family. None of it is expensive, and most of it can be done this month, no lab coat required.

Filter the drinking water with a method that actually removes fluoride.

• Reverse osmosis removes fluoride. It is the method I recommend first: a reverse-osmosis filter at the kitchen sink, or a multi-stage system that includes a reverse-osmosis stage.
• Distillation removes fluoride too.
• A filter certified for fluoride removes it. Read the claim carefully, the way you would read a used-car warranty: gravity filters with optional fluoride-reduction elements reduce fluoride but do not eliminate it.
• Ordinary pitcher filters do not remove fluoride. Activated carbon filters, including most pitcher and countertop filters, will reduce chlorine and some other contaminants, but they will not solve the fluoride problem, whatever the pretty box suggests.
• Boiling does not remove fluoride at all. It concentrates it, because the water leaves as steam and the fluoride stays behind in the pot. The mother who boils tap water to make it safe for the baby’s bottle is, without knowing it, making it stronger in fluoride. It is the most loving mistake in the kitchen, and an easy one to fix.
• A shower filter is for chlorine, which I teach in Chapter 3. It does not remove fluoride.

Two practical notes on filters. First, a filter only works if it is maintained: a reverse-osmosis system whose cartridges are never changed stops doing its job and becomes an expensive piece of plumbing, so follow the maker’s schedule. Second, reverse-osmosis and distilled water have had their minerals removed along with the contaminants. Add them back with a pinch of unrefined sea salt or a few drops of trace mineral solution, or choose a system with a remineralizing stage at the end.

If you want to know what you are dealing with, your water utility’s annual Consumer Confidence Report lists the fluoride level in your water. It is not a page-turner, but it is worth a look.

Choose fluoride-free toothpaste, and never let children swallow toothpaste, bubble-gum flavor or not.

Limit black and green tea, especially for children, and favor herbal teas. Your teapot can stay; just change what goes in it.

Avoid soy formula. Breast milk is best. If formula is needed, the Weston A. Price Foundation publishes a homemade formula based on whole milk, and any formula should be mixed with fluoride-free water, not boiled tap water. A pregnant mother who is planning to bottle-feed can take Dr. Blaylock’s concern about soy formula and fluoride to her midwife or doctor and talk through the options together. Her pregnancy and her baby’s feeding are decisions she makes with them.

Avoid aluminum, the other half of the dangerous pair: aluminum cookware, foil for cooking, canned drinks and aluminum antacids. Cook in stainless steel, cast iron or glass, the pans your grandmother would recognize.

Wash and peel conventional produce, or buy organic, to avoid cryolite residue. A good scrub costs nothing.

Cut back on processed foods and drinks made with fluoridated water: sodas, juices from concentrate and reconstituted soups. Your water filter cannot help with what comes out of a can.

Protect the body with nutrition. Dr. Blaylock recommends magnesium, vitamins C, D and E, selenium, curcumin, and the omega-3 fat DHA. Ask, too, about your iodine status, since fluoride competes with it.

Do not stop a medication on your own. If you take a medication that contains fluorine, ask the doctor who prescribed it whether there is an alternative.

A family that does the first three of these (a filter that removes fluoride, fluoride-free toothpaste and fewer cups of black tea) has closed the biggest doors. Small, steady changes are enough. You do not need to be afraid. You need a filter, a new tube of toothpaste, and a box of herbal tea. That is a shopping list, not a crisis.

The water is the first room. In the next chapter we walk through the rest of the house, cabinet by cabinet.

Footnotes and sources for this chapter

Sources and Further Reading

On fluoride and the brain, bones and thyroid

• Blaylock, R. L. “Why Fluoride Is Toxic.” The Blaylock Wellness Report, 2004.
• Choi, A. L., Sun, G., Zhang, Y., and Grandjean, P. “Developmental Fluoride Neurotoxicity: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.” Environmental Health Perspectives 120, no. 10 (2012): 1362–1368.
• The research of Dr. Phyllis Mullenix on fluoride in the brain, and of Dr. Jennifer Luke on fluoride in the pineal gland, as reported by Dr. Blaylock.
• U.S. National Toxicology Program. 2024 conclusion on fluoride exposure and children’s IQ.
• Food & Water Watch v. EPA, U.S. District Court ruling, September 2024.

On the history of water fluoridation

• Fluoride: Poison on Tap (documentary, 2015).
• Bryson, C. The Fluoride Deception. Seven Stories Press, 2004.
• Connett, P., Beck, J., and Micklem, H. S. The Case Against Fluoride: How Hazardous Waste Ended Up in Our Drinking Water and the Bad Science and Powerful Politics That Keep It There. Chelsea Green, 2010.
• Bernays, E. Propaganda. Horace Liveright, 1928.
• The Fluoride Action Network.

On the halogens

• Brownstein, D. Iodine: Why You Need It, Why You Can’t Live Without It. Medical Alternatives Press, fifth edition 2014.
• Sircus, M. Healing With Iodine.
• Center for Science in the Public Interest. Potassium Bromate in Bread.

On water and practical steps

• Schulze, R. Dr. Schulze’s 20 Powerful Steps to a Healthier Life.
• The Weston A. Price Foundation’s homemade infant formula recipe.