Dhru Purohit Show - #207: The Dangers of Fluoride on the Brain and IQ with Dr. Mark Burhenne

Episode Date: April 15, 2021

If we want to continue learning how to optimize health, we have to stay open to new information that might contradict previous research, even if it questions the status quo.  Fluoride and dental health are great examples of this process. Fluoride gained support due to an observation one man made many years ago, which has progressed into many cities fluoridating their water and most dentists singing its praises. But over the years the research on fluoride has greatly evolved, to the point that we can now see large differences in how it works topically versus internally, and identify risks that come with consumption.  Today’s guest on The Dhru Purohit Podcast spent much of his time as a new dentist and new parent grappling with whether it was a good idea to give fluoride to his kids. Dr. Mark Burhenne is a functional dentist, and the author of the #1 Amazon bestseller The 8-Hour Sleep Paradox. He has appeared in Dr. Hyman's Sleep Masterclass, the oral microbiome docuseries Gateway to Health, NPR, and many more.  Dhru and Dr. Burhenne talk about the emerging research that supports connections between fluoride and IQ changes, neurotoxicity, arthritis, osteosarcomas, and changes in metabolism, among other concerns. Dr. Burhenne explains how fluoride works in the body, and why using it topically is very different than consuming it. They also talk about the root cause of cavities—it’s not a deficiency in fluoride, but the sugary and starchy foods making up the Standard American Diet, an altered oral microbiome, and mouth breathing. In this episode, we dive into:  -What made Dr. Burhenne first question fluoride (3:24)  -Why fluoride is added to our water (8:52)  -Conventional dentistry and fluoride use (14:22)  -Studies that show why we need to rethink adding fluoride to our water (21:47)  -The EPA Federal lawsuit that could limit fluoride in drinking water (24:25)  -The effects of fluoride on the brain (31:42)  -How we get fluoride in water (35:29)  -Why fluoride in toothpaste doesn’t really work (37:59)  -How to choose a water filter (50:18)  -Dr. Burhenne’s toothpaste recommendations (56:36)  -What actually creates cavities and healthy teeth (1:05:02)  -What we can learn from modern hunter-gatherers when it comes to dental health (1:11:22)  Also mentioned in this episode: -The EPA Federal lawsuit that could limit fluoride in drinking water - https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/news/federal-lawsuit-could-limit-fluoride-drinking-water -Prenatal Fluoride Exposure and Cognitive Outcomes in Children at 4 and 6-12 Years of Age in Mexico - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28937959/ -The Association Between Maternal Fluoride Exposure During Pregnancy and IQ Scores in Offspring in Canada - https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/2748634 -Fluoride Action Network - http://fluoridealert.org/ -ZeroWater Filter - https://zerowater.com/ -RiseWell Toothpaste - https://risewell.com/ -Boka Oral Care - https://www.boka.com/ -The Secret to Better Sleep? Stop Doing This One Thing with Dr. Mark Burhenne - https://drhyman.com/blog/2019/07/04/bb-ep62/ For more on Dr. Burhenne you can follow him on Instagram @askthedentist, on Facebook @askthedentist, and through his website https://askthedentist.com/. Check out his podcast Ask The Dentist. Get his book, The 8-Hour Sleep Paradox: How We Are Sleeping Our Way to Fatigue, Disease and Unhappiness at https://askthedentist.com/the-book. You can search for a Functional Dentist at https://askthedentist.com/directory/. This episode is brought to you by CogniBiotics. If you want to support your own gut-brain axis, BiOptimizers is offering my community a special deal of 10% off. Just go to www.cognibiotics.com/dhru and use code DHRU10. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you are drinking fluoridated water, if you're a mom, if you're pregnant, if your infant is drinking water, or getting formula being made with fluoridated water, then the IQ of your child will drop by five, between five and nine points. Hi, everyone, Drew Prod here. On today's podcast, we explore the dangers of long-term fluoride exposure on the brain and the body. Contrary to popular belief, the idea that fluoride is overall good for us and adding it to the water system is a benefit to public health is not settled science. There are a lot of studies that are increasingly coming out that are questioning this assumption. In fact, there's a landmark lawsuit that is going on right now that is looking to overturn this. recommendation that we've thought for many years is safe and healthy for our bodies and especially our teeth. To explore this topic with us, we have Dr. Mark Perhanna, functional dentist and health advocate. We're going to go deep on the topic of fluoride

and the dangers associated around it. Stay tuned. This episode of the podcast is brought to you by cognibiotics by bio-optimizers. Many of you probably have seen the documentary that I made with my business partner, Dr. Mark Hyman, called Broken Brain. And inside of that documentary, we had a whole team of experts around the world from different institutions talk about the gut brain access, which has some really powerful impacts for how we feel and function every day. These days, we all hear about the power of probiotics and how they can support the good bacteria living in our gut. But what many people don't know is that those bacteria don't just influence how we digest and absorb food. They also play a role in creating

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The code is Drew 10. Get it today to get 10% off, one of my favorite probiotics out there. Now back to this week's episode. Dr. B, Dr. Mark Brayana, welcome back to the Broken Brain podcast. It's great to have you here. Drew, I am excited. I'm excited about today's topic, and it's always great to have a discussion with you. Yes, and I really appreciate your balanced approach, especially when it comes to categories that require more investigation, whether it be, you know, heavy metals and mercury usage coming into, you know, dental health or in this case we're talking about fluoride right fluoride this thing that a lot of people

have heard of but they may not understand originally where it came from and what its uses are and the strong arguments that are both for it and also against it and some of the data and the research that's come out over the last few years on the topic it's an important thing to chat about and we'll get into all the reasons why but first let's start off with when can you first remember hearing about fluoride as a practitioner or in your training? What did you hear about it and what did you understand in your training as a dentist about fluoride? Well, what you said earlier, it's easy to jump on a bandwagon and run with it. And that whole idea of having a balanced kind of approach to things, I've been grappling with fluoride, whether it's safe or not,

should I use it on my patients? Should I raise my daughters with fluorid, having them drink Florida water? I've been grappling. with this for ever since I graduated from dental school and mostly ever since Catherine, my first born was born. I mean, that's that's 32 years now. So it's been a long process. And can I ask one question about that? So even in your dental training, you were grappling it with it then because having so many family members that are dentists, sort of the world of dentistry, just like doctors learning about nutrition in medical school, you sort of are just indoctrinated into just anything that's shared. You're not really told to question it.

You're like, this is the science that's out there. You know, don't question it. So what put you in a place and situation that you actually had some questions? What was going on in your life that in dental school, you just didn't accept that, or at least, yes, that there were some questions. Yeah, that's a great question because we are indoctrinated. I was very excited to be at this dental school and to have gotten in. And you kind of roll with it. And everything. that you are given, you know, didactically, clinically, you try and absorb as quickly as possible. You don't have time to question something and then go and do research. There's no time at dental school. So that's a really good question. I think it happened, I can't remember specifically,

but I think it happened. It came to a head before my oldest daughter was born, because I was worried about water to begin with. I was raising my family in the Silicon Valley. It's a very fragmented water supply there. It doesn't come from Hedge Hetchy one reservoir up in the Sierras like in San Francisco. That's a pretty good water supply. So it was groundwater. And this groundwater, I mean, there were super sites nearby. There's a lot of, we've had industrial silicon chip manufacturing there since the 60s. And a lot of that stuff gets dumped into the ground, gets into the groundwater. So I went out and bought a filter. And part of my approach was, well, what can I filter out? What do I need to filter out? And fluoride was on that list because,

and I'm trying to answer your question, it's difficult because I don't really remember, but it was something in me. And again, I was into health. I was a biochemistry major. I was taking supplements then. I was reading books on longevity. That was just kind of a hobby on the side of dentistry. Hadn't really formed that functional approach yet. And to me, it just seemed ludicrous. It was so fluoride in the water. What else do we add to fluoride? Well, we add chlorine, bromine, you know, to disinfect the water, to prevent E. coli, you know, bacteria from getting into us from the tap. And that makes sense, right? Because water, unfortunately, it's hard to keep clean if you are storing it in large reservoirs and shipping it. And then, and then we add

fluoride. Well, fluoride is not a vitamin. It's not a supplement. It's a it's an ionic element that's on the periodic table. It's very similar to calcium. It's very electronegative. It's got that extra electron on it. And so usually it's never found alone. It's always combining with something like calcium and sodium. And it just didn't make sense to me. I was very nervous about it. Now, at the time, I had read about the fact that fluoride could be affecting our, not our children's IQ, but IQ in general. But there was no basis for that. There was the communist plot concept or idea that the Russians were doing it to dumb us down.

There was talk of osteosarcomas, bone cancer issues. And based on my biochemistry, I knew enough, and not from dental school, I knew enough about fluoride knowing that it's going to combine with a lot of calcium and phosphates if it's ingested, you know, gets into the bloodstream, past the bloodstream, into the tissues, it's going to combine with a lot of phosphates and calcium. Of course, those are the two main ingredients in teeth along with hydroxyapitite. So, but there are a lot of other versions of calcium and phosphate inside the cell. So you're going to introduce fluoride.

It's very attracted to all these things. And fluoride is grabbed up by all of this. How can that affect metabolism? And as it turns out, that lesser of two evil argument, and that argument for me was, you know what, I'm not sure about this. I'm going to try and eliminate it and raise my kids without ingesting it. And then 30 years later, all of this stuff, I mean, all of these studies are supporting just kind of the ideas that I had as a young dentist that could be the issue.

I think in hindsight now, now that you've asked that question, I wasn't prepared for that question, by the way. That was a good one. It was the osteosarcomas. There was some validity in my mind to that being an issue. Well, I mean, most, I mean, our kids, their skeletal muscular system develops by age 10. There's a little growth after that. But why would you want fluoride into every calcified tissue in the body, including the teeth? Now, the argument back then that chloride was, good for the teeth, okay, you know, I kind of kind of balance that against the argument of getting fluoride into all the calcified tissues, bone, even bone marrow, cartilage. And I thought to me, well, I would rather, and this is what it came down to. Again, a lesser of two evils argument, I'd rather that they have a few cavities than later to find out that all these things could happen. And as it turns out, most of it, not the communist plot part, but most of it has come has come true. I mean, we've got studies that support IQ changes, neuro, you know, neurotoxicity, arthritis, osteosarcomas, changes in metabolism. I mean, fluoride gets into every cellular process,

just like calcium does. Calcium and fluoride are almost the same thing. And before we go and explore those, let's even take a step back further. You know, people know that fluoride is used, at least the languaging and from a public health measure it was used and added to the water to protect teeth. They may not know exactly why. So let's go on the other side and can you just talk about that? How did we end up in this place where we're using fluoride and the way that it was explained to you in your dental training of why this is being added into the water and what does it exactly do with the teeth? Right. And that's important because it was an observational moment. It was a dentist at the turn of the century, 1900s. He was in Colorado, and he noticed

that certain populations, I think was Colorado Springs, that those kids had brown teeth. And of course, as we know now, that's fluorosis. That's too much fluoride being absorbed into the enamel structure as the tooth is forming. And it's called model teeth or fluorosis. But he also noticed that they weren't getting as many cavities as kids from other cities. So, By the 20s, they had it figured out. They had scientists at Alcoa, which is a big aluminum company, finally bring out their expensive, you know, scanning electron microscopy or whatever heavy equipment they had to be able to analyze the water.

And the only thing, the only difference was the ambient or the natural higher levels of fluoride in the water. And then with that, the dentistry, the profession ran with that. And by 1945, in Michigan, I can't remember, Ann Arbor maybe, but in Michigan, they fluoridated the water supply and observed the effects of that over an 11 or 15-year period. And they deduced, and they observationally, again, correlation, they noticed that there was about one or two cavities less per kid that was drinking fluoridated water. And actually that was overstated. today, if we go back and look at that study, we would say that on average a child would have one less cavity if they were drinking the proper amount of fluoride, ingesting the proper amount of fluoride. And we can go into why that was done, but also dosing is an issue as well.

And since then, fluoride has appeared everywhere, and now we're getting way too much fluoride. 41% of us of kids in the U.S. right now have fluorosis. That's kind of a marker for having ingested too much fluoride because the teeth, and again, we can't see the bones. Even an x-ray may not pick that up, but we can see the teeth visually. And when we cut teeth for fillings and all that, we can see the effects of a lot of fluoride being absorbed into a tooth while it's being formed. The enamel organ inside the gum is creating this tooth, putting all the pieces together. And when it erupts, we can see that there are either some white spots and even worse, A further stage of fluorosis would be brown spots.

And these spots show us that that kid has absorbed a certain amount of fluoride. And it's very prevalent in this country right now. It's 41%. It used to be a little bit higher. But the CDC, the government lowered those levels in 2015. We were at about 1.3 parts per million of fluoride in the water. And now it's down to 0.7. And I'm hoping, and I'm hoping I can convince everyone that listens today,

to this podcast that it really should be zero or at least a lot less. So, but already the studies are coming out and we're beginning to see a kind of a movement. And unfortunately, it's not dentistry. If you talk to the ADA, they say 1.3 was fine. Sure, one part per million is fine. We recommend that we keep the fluoride in the water. But as you'll see, with all the data that we're going to talk about today, it just doesn't make sense. So it's something that dentistry was very proud of, some dentists.

and some organizations in the profession, obviously, are still very proud of. But we discovered it inadvertently, and it's completely observational. And the observations that we made back then were not correct. And again, that falls back to my decision 32 years ago, that lesser two evils, I literally made it the decision. And it turns out that my kids don't have cavities, thank goodness, for any fillings. But even if they would have gotten that one cavity, the child that gets fluoride, gets one less gets one more cavity than then a child that doesn't drink fluoride well okay

i still don't have to worry about the osteosarcomas and now IQ and and neurotoxicity and effects on arthritis and all that so so it's something that dentistry is still very proud of and if you speak to a dentist yeah most most dentists will tell you how great it is but it's based on an observational event back in the 1900s, and we're still sticking with that. And thank goodness, we've got studies now that are countering that. And we do have studies that are countering that. And it's almost like knowing many dentists, again, young and older, who are, let's say, for lack of a better term, conventional, right?

There's not really sort of an open-minded thinking, not just with fluoride, but other categories that, you know, that, yes, sugar. is important, but so is all these fat soluble vitamins and the whole thing that we talked about last time and mouth taping, which you've been such a big proponent of, and you've talked about on the podcast before. With conventional dentistry, when the topic of fluoride comes up, it's even sometimes if you bring it up and you start questioning or you start referencing, they sort of feel like you're questioning. It's like a litmus test of like now all of a sudden you're with like Q and on, right? Or like you're like some big.

conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. And I think that my goal in really doing this podcast here with you today is that you know, you are a very, you're a dentist with a super awesome pedigree behind you. You also run evidence-based website, Ask the Dentist.com, where people come in from all around the globe. You're to get answers on a lot of different questions that are out there. You are advisor to, you know, different companies that are there, different startups. And you're not some whack job conspiracy theorist. You're just an individual who has questions and wants to present the information so that people can make up their mind and weigh out the pros and cons that are there for them. But I do think that we have to acknowledge that for some people,

it is as if you are all of a sudden joined a cult if you start questioning the usage of a fluoride. So going from there, just share with us a little bit more. You talked about how fluoride is used from a public health perspective and the thinking behind it. How about also as a dentist, how you were using it in your practice and how it's how it's using that sort of setting. Right. Well, of course, as Dennis, when we see a young child for the first time, we first thing we do, we're trained to do is ask the parent, you know, is the child getting fluoride via tablets or it's usually combined with vitamins? And it's the physician that prescribes that, actually. So we just check on that. And of course, we assume that they're

drinking tap water. And that's the first thing we check. We want to make sure that child is ingesting fluoride so that when the teeth start forming that the teeth, the baby teeth as well and the adult teeth take up this fluoride. And the concept there is that if the fluoride is in your bloodstream at the time that the tooth, the enamel organ, which is the tissue that creates the tooth in the jawbone, in the underneath the gum, if that fluoride is available, it's going to, The tooth organ is going to grab the fluoride over calcium that's running,

and we all have calcium in our bloodstream. It's essential to metabolism. But because the fluoride is more electronegative, it gets taken up and gets incorporated, not just on the outside, which is what we call topical fluoride. I'll get into that later, but it gets incorporated into the structure of Denton, which is the softer material underneath and then enamel on the outside.

And the theory is that, and it's true, when you take fluoride and combine it with calcium and phosphate, the other ingredients, it completely replaces the hydro hydroxyapatite, which is the main ingredient of teeth. We're going to talk about that as well, because that's a new thing that's coming and toothpaste and so it's replacing the biomimetic material that the tooth would be made out of, and it takes the fluoride, and it makes a harder, a wavier surface, and a more brittle tooth, but it is less susceptible to acids created by the Western diet. So when you eat a lot of carbohydrates, and again, the sugar industry promotes, has promoted,

way back when has promoted the fluoridation of municipal water supplies in the U.S. Just as they demonized fat and, you know, how that went down. But if you eat sugar and if you eat carbohydrates, processed carbohydrates, junk food, then that really is the root cause of decay. It's not that your tooth has been poorly constructed by the human body and, you know, via years and millions of years of evolution. But we think we need to make it better. We put the fluoride in there as the building block supply and the fluoride gets taken up. The problem is that fluoride's being taken up by all the calcified tissues. It crosses over into the blood-brain barrier into the brain.

It can cross over the placental barrier to a fetus, and that's where the problems come up. So in dentistry, we make sure that the fluoride's getting to the child before the teeth form, and then later, up until age 14, we are recommending after it's almost ubiquitous. It just gets done. The insurance pays for it. we recommend these varnishes, these fluoride varnishes that get painted on the teeth. If the kid gets a lot of cavities, we don't talk to them about, you know, you should stop eating this stuff.

The root cause of decay is food, maybe mouth breathing, pH changes in the mouth, dysbiosis of the oral microbiome. It's, you know, you're not getting enough fluoride. You're not using a fluoridated toothpaste. So we have a fluoride deficiency in a way. Exactly. And it's not, it's not an essential nutrient. It's not, you don't see it in any supplements or vitamins other than, you have a fluoridated.

the vitamins that we give are newborns, it's drops at that point, and then when they can swallow a tablet. The interesting thing is, is that the vitamins, the product's called tri-by-flore, it's been around forever. You've got vitamins, B-vitamins and E and A, and you've got vitamins combined with fluoride. And the interesting thing is, is that vitamin absorption is best on a full stomach, and fluoride absorption is best on an empty stomach. So when do you take this vitamin. I mean, it's just, it's all packaging and convenience and, you know, something on the shelf that a physician or a dentist or even in a drugstore, you can just grab and take. It's all for convenience. And so fluoride varnishes are probably contributing in a major way to the increase in

fluorosis over the last 20, 30 years with kids. Even a mom who's pregnant that gets this varnish, it can be painted on, it can be put into trays where foam kind of, you know, billows out. And And basically you're covering those teeth in a few minutes in a very high strength fluoride, like 500 parts per million. Toothpaste is one part per million. Sorry, it's 100 parts per million. And the varnishes are a prescription strength version of fluoride. You're not supposed to swallow any of it.

You know, kids swallow stuff. I mean, you give them instructions not to swallow. What if the pregnant mom swallows it? That fetus is getting a big hit of fluoride, which is affecting, you know, that bone growth given that day. It's almost like tree rings. You know, when you see a tree and you cut a tree and you can tell what the drought years were, you can do that with the tooth.

If the child's had a high fever, they've had a big dose of fluoride, you can see in the layers of the tooth what happened at that moment. Yeah, and not to mention the fact that our mouth is very permeable. So just anything that you put into our mouth, you know, often can just go directly into the, to the bloodstream depending on what the agent is. And I'm not too familiar with the absorbability in the mouth of fluoride, but I can imagine that would be there. It's a very good point.

I mean, the oral mucosa is just like the gut. It's very permeable. That's how homeopathic medicines are delivered, right? For the people that are listening here with a skeptical ear or an interested ear, like, well, okay, yeah. I mean, I know that fluoride has been used. I didn't really think of it too much. I want to hear about just a couple of these studies.

Let's pick one category here, and maybe one of the most fascinating studies that you came across, where you really started to see that these hunches and ideas that you had 30 years ago, which I consider that, you know, it sounds like there was a, you know, there weren't maybe the level of studies that there are today. There may not been really hardly much at all at the time, but you were listening to voices that were out there. there could be in the medical community, could be environmental activist or sort of health advocates.

And you are taking what we think of today as sort of the precautionary principle, you know, kind of like the European approach, the precautionary principle, which is, okay, if there's no clear data at the moment, until this thing is actually proven safe and not just from an observational way, I'm going to weigh the pros and cons and say, maybe I actually don't need this right now. Right? So that's what's 32 years ago. Now, a lot of that. information has been backed up. So give us one study that you could start off with that really demonstrates maybe we need to rethink this addition to the water. Right. No, great question. And again, you're right. Do no harm. That's really what every healthcare professional should be

focusing on. And if you don't have, if you don't have, lack of evidence is not evidence in any form at all. And then you could take that one step further where, you know, it doesn't mean that if there isn't any evidence that there will be any good evidence later on down the road. So again, back to that lesser of evidence. Right. The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. Yes, exactly. People say there's no evidence that's out there. It's like, well, okay, let's just understand. There's scientific community is growing every year and there's new studies and things that are there. You're not always going to have a double-blind placebo control trial. Who's funding it? Who's going to do it, especially when it comes to things like nutrition and multi-layers of health. But yeah,

that absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. Usually when I hear people say, well, there's no evidence. That's to me kind of code work where, yes, there may not be evidence in certain areas, but you also hear well-meaning individuals, healthcare professionals and non-health care professionals, that's just code word for I'm not aware, right? I'm not aware of taking the time to be able to dig into things. Right. And all of that worry for one less cavity per child, right?

I mean, anyway, but no, lots of studies. The big ones, the ones that are making big news right now, and there is a lawsuit against the CDC or EPA that is hopefully will be decided upon soon. I mean, the judge has gotten all this information. I followed the lawsuit. It was here in San Francisco. It was fascinating. It happened during the COVID era last year.

And, you know, it's funny, it really didn't make the news. No one really knows about this study. And it's a landmark study, a lawsuit. This is a landmark lawsuit. This is the first time that citizens have been able to sue at this level via the Toxic Substance Control Act, the CDC and the EPA. And that's where all the studies have been presented. So the, the, the, the, the, um, the EPA really had had very little, uh, to say. I mean, they actually hired, ironically, they hired the people, not the people, but the, the, the scientists,

the white lab coats that they were fighting against with the tobacco industry. So the irony is there, they hired these rent a lab coats. And all their, their job is just to dismiss the information, to show the loopholes. the study, and that was their best defense. And later, if you want, I can read some of the depositions from CDC oral health director and how he basically had nothing to say. I mean, they don't have enough data to support and to refute the studies that essentially if you are drinking fluoridated water, if you're a mom, if you're pregnant, if your infant

is drinking water or getting formula being made with fluoridated water, then the IQ of your child will drop by five, between five and nine points. It depends on the study. Which is huge. I mean, just to compare that, there's not many things that are even off. Oh, go ahead. Please, sorry, I cut you off. Yeah, but I think a lot of people, and I have to admit, you know, I had to do a little

research first, it didn't seem like that much to me. But you're absolutely right. It is a huge drop in points. And if you look at the bell curve of IQ in the States and you shift that, you shift that, over, you know, given those five to nine points, there's a 57% increase in that category of children of an IQ with less than 70, a 57% increase. Just with that five to seven, five to nine points, it depends on the study. So these studies, there are 64 of them. They're all extremely well done. There are a few that are extremely well done and have great pedigree. One's done

the bash hash study in 2017. Hope I'm pronouncing that right. That was done by a company, a group of professionals that have done 50 studies on neurotoxicity and epigenetics and exposure to children. They've done lead. They've done, you know, just about air pollution. There's another one. Arsenic in the water. And they were interested. They've seen all the other studies. So they did a wonderfully double, double blind, very well control. They took out alcoholics. They took out, what were the big items are alcoholics, poor health, complications in pregnancy, tea drinkers.

And their findings were exactly the same as all the other studies, that there is a significant and easily recognizable drop in IQ points. So, I mean, that's neurotoxicity. How does that happen? What is the mechanism? There are all sorts of ideas on that. But it's amazing that we haven't really talked about this over the last 50 years, as long as we've had fluoridation.

And back when, when I was a young dentist, there was talk of a reduction in IQ, but there were no studies supporting it. So there are effects of the brain. that at that time when you were a young Dennis, where were you hearing these sort of contrarian ideas? Who are they? Were they public health advocates? Were they, you know, folks from the concerned citizens? Like, who are the people that you were hearing from back then, if you remember? Right. And I do. And they were not professionals. They were not PhDs or scientists or physicians, which is what, who were hearing it from now, researchers. It was just kind of a

reaction to the politics of putting something in the water that everyone is exposed to and everyone's forced to drink. And again, this was before the internet. So this was all just word of mouth and maybe there was some articles in the newspaper. But I ignored all that because, you know, these were the same people that were saying it was a communist plot. The Russians were controlling our weather. It was the Cold War. I mean, it was nuts, just like things are now, right? And But I just ignored all that. And I just said, listen, you know, I just don't know enough about fluoride to expose my kids to it. I have fluorosis, Drew.

I grew up in San Francisco. I don't remember if I had the tablets or not, but I did drink the water. And I have a type 1 fluorosis, which is the lowest level of it basically exhibits itself by little white spots, like little perlessent spots on the teeth. And that is a form of fluorosis. I probably got too much fluoride. the other effects on the brain. Let's answer that question. And while you get ready for that next portion,

which is the other effects of the brain, I want to mention that the lawsuit that you were referring to earlier, it's a gentleman, I don't know how to pronounce his name properly, but I looked it up before the interview, Dr. Grandian, Dr. Grandian, Philippi, Grangian, he's from the Harvard Chan School of Public Health,

and he was the plaintiff that was coming in against the CDC saying that there is genuine concern. So for the folks that are listening, it's not just off the beaten path, functional medicine doctors and folks that are in what can be considered the health and wellness and in a podcast community. There are people, again, with really top-notch pedigree, Harvard's Chan School of Public Health, which is a top school, we're saying, listen, no matter how long we have been used to this thing, we have to be willing to question it as the research grows, and he was the one that I believe was leading it. And I didn't see much about it either.

The only people that I saw when you and I were preparing for it is the environmental working group. You know, they covered it a little bit and I had to look up some of their information. My business partner, Dr. Mark Hyman, he's on the board. But, you know, we were kind of all caught up into sort of pandemic drama. And it was just one of those things that didn't really float up on the radar at the time. Exactly. Exactly. And it's too bad. But I think we'll be here. hearing more about this. I think we are reaching a turning point. But here's a list of neurological brain development issues. So we've talked about the reduction in IQ. It also has an effect on the pinnial gland. And the pinnial gland, of course, is key in producing melatonin, which affects our sleep,

our circadian rhythms. And again, remember when I said earlier, if a cell in your body needs calcium, and that's pretty much all cells, and it sees fluoride, it's going to grab the fluoride first because the fluoride is more, for the lack of a better word, it's more magnetic. It's more attracted to that, to make that union. And calcium gets forgotten. So you have to be okay with the fact that fluoride now is doing the work that calcium was supposed to be doing in a cell, in a mitochondria, for example, or in any cell. And so pineal gland calcification, we're seeing a lot more of that.

That's on the increase since we've been fluoridating our water. A thyroid function is a lot of, there's been a lot of research on that. That's already 10, 15 years old, that research. Arthritis joints, you're more likely to get arthritis. It damages bone and an increase in hip fracture. That's something I heard back in dental school, but now we have studies that discuss that bone cancer. It also damages the human male sperm. It's a cause of infertility.

That's on the rise as well, and that's a big issue. Incredibly on the rise. Big New York Times article. that came out just this week talking about how infertility rates, lower sperm counts. We've been knowing it's been going on for a while, but now it's at a level where even very mainstream people are like, something is up and it's not just stress, although stress seems to be playing a major role in it. Right.

And how sort of families are coping and the changing nature of sort of work and feeling kind of like comfortable in life economically, but major concerns. concern. Yeah. There's a, there are a lot of studies now that are examining the link between fluoride as an epigenetic factor, and we know that Alzheimer's is mostly epigenetic. There are some genetic, you know, predispositions to it, but that, you know, with the potential role of fluoride in the pathogenesis of Alzheimer's disease.

And there's a study, I'm looking at it right now, 2018, it's out of, um, it's out of, um, Looks like it's out of Europe. Essentially, it says that the brain affects cellular energy and metabolism, synthesis of inflammatory factors, neurotransmitter metabolism, microglial activation, that's what heals the brain every night, the expression of proteins involved in neuronal maturation, and there are links now between fluoride and ADHD. So fluoride definitely has an effect on the brain. I mean, we're seeing it pop up now constantly with all sorts of studies that are agreeing with the other study.

Some of the studies aren't perfect. Some of the studies, most of the studies are excellent, and they're all coming out with the same data. This is no coincidence. You know, when a lot of folks who are pro-fluoride or maybe questioning about the literature and the studies that are out there, when a lot of those folks that are out there say, well, look, yes, a lot of fluoride can lead to these things, but most of us are not getting it. Most of us are not getting a lot of fluoride. Tell us why that argument doesn't actually add up, right? Tell us how that argument actually kind of breaks down a little bit. Yeah, that's a really good point. And that's really a discussion about concentration, dose, and dosage.

So the concentration is pretty much under control. So let me just give you the idea of how we get fluoride in the water. It's an interesting story and I'll answer your question. So today, and it was a little different before we had scrubbers put onto our smokestacks of big corporate plants that were making pesticides, fertilizer, nuclear waste. What's the other one? aluminum smelters, all of those smokestacks are collecting and solidifying the byproducts of these manufacturing processes. Let's pick on the fertilizer phosphate industry because I like picking on them because they're

also involved with big food. Big food is part of the root of the cause of decay. They're making the junk food. They cause the cavities. They also produce the fertilizer that grows the wheat. And again, this is all in Mark Hyman's book. food fix, right? And then, but in those factories, in the fertilizer, they're catching fluorosilic acid, which is then not refined, not purified, is trucked to a municipal water

supply and dropped into the water. And then the concentration is finely tuned to currently 0.7 parts per million. It used to be higher than that. And then that concentration is available at your tap. Well, now comes the dose, right? The dose is how often you consume the concentration of fluoride in the water. So dose becomes variable at that point. If you're drinking, well, if you're filtering your water, you're not getting any of that fluoride. And that's what I recommend to filter your water. If you aren't filtering your water, then you're getting a certain dose if you drink one glass,

but if you drink 10 glasses, or if you make a plate of pasta, a bowl of pasta, and you drain off the water, it's in the pasta. If you cook with this water, if you make formula, baby formula for your child. So what is the actual dose? I mean, how much are you actually getting? And then dosage is about body weight. Is it a fetus? Is it a child or is it an adult? So really, you're getting probably more fluoride than the government thinks you're getting.

Not to mention processed foods and the usage of water that goes into them. right, preservidence. Also, you can breathe in fluoride, certain areas, fluoride levels high in the air, and then also, of course, toothpaste. And we're pushing toothpaste. Fluoride and toothpaste really doesn't work. I get a lot of flack for that. If you buy or get a prescription for a prescription strength toothpaste, which has 5,000 parts per million, that's like Previdant 5,000, that works. Topically fluoride works. Again, because it's very available. and if the tooth is a little bit decalcified and it sees fluoride, it's going to grab that fluoride ion and like a magnet, it's going to stick onto the tooth and kind of armor-plated and

make it more resistant to low pH events in the mouth. That would be high acid attacks after eating a starchy meal. But again, the root cause is the starchy meal and we're adding fluoride to everyone's drinking water to maybe, you know, maybe so you'll only have one cavity instead of, you know, I mean, it's, the thinking is just, it's ridiculous. It's really unfortunate that we've kind of tried to solve the problem. And again, decay rates have gone down nationally and also globally. And if you look at the data points, the decay rate has gone down in at the same rate, almost at the exact same rate in countries that fluoridate and countries that don't fluoridate. And by the way, Europe doesn't fluoridate. 97% of Europe is not fluoridated.

It's a good reminder because people forget, we think that we're so ethnocentric in terms of what's happening here. Right, right. We have a podcast audience that's all over the world, but the United States is, you know, pretty much universally fluorates and fluorinates in different sorts of counties, but many other places don't. Canada is a little bit of a hodgepodge. There's certain places that do, certain places that don't.

And there is another really interesting study that we'll talk about that came out of Canada from some researchers that are there. But not everybody is down this pathway of hyper. fluoridation. Well, in the U.S., we consume per capita the most fluoride anywhere in the world. And if you take all the countries combined that do fluoridate, we're still drinking more fluoridated water than they are. And I think this is an important part to zoom out and say, you know, here we are hyper-focusing on this one thing. But fluoride is an example of multiple insults that we can encounter in our life. And our body, you know, there's always this analogy that functional

medicine doctors use and they say, okay, imagine a cup, a cup that's not full with water. And every time you get exposure to, you know, pesticides and heavy metals and other things in our food and glyphosate and GMOs, all that is an insult. It's an impact on the body, something the body has to manage. And, you know, on a daily basis, our body can do pretty well, especially when we're younger managing. But the more insults that you add, again, we know about some of these insults very openly, like smoking is another example of an insult, but even fluoride is an insult. And as you add drop, drop, drop, drop, drop, sure, it might be when you're a little bit

older, but all of a sudden, the cup overflows. And now you have some sort of chronic component that you're dealing with. And is it all linked to fluoride? No, but fluoride can be one of the insults. And in some people, it could be a primary insult that would make them more likely to get a particular condition or disease. That's a really good point. And to me, that's the argument, well, back to the lesser two evils argument,

but also another argument where out of all the things that we're exposed to, there's very little we can do about glyphosate, for example. It's going to probably be in our environment for a long time. Certainly we can eat less foods that contain that. Air pollution. How do we deal with that? It's hard to filter your air outside. If you're indoors, maybe you can fill.

filter it, water we can filter, but not everyone is able to do that. But here's, this is an easy one. Just get rid of the fluoride in the water. Stop adding it. I mean, we've, we've created this problem. And so this is an easy pick. If you want to raise healthy children, have healthy people in this country, it would be easy just to eliminate the fluoride. I don't think there'll be more cavities. I think the decrease, the sudden decrease in cavities is about education, about the profession of dentistry, doing a good job of that, fluoridated toothpaste, also hydroxyapitite toothpaste. We can talk about that later. I mean, this is an easy one compared to all, like lead.

I mean, lead is difficult to get rid of if you live in an old building, asbestos. You got to wall it off. It's hard to remove. Fluoride's easy. This is a no-brainer. It's about time we just remove it from the water supply. It's one less thing we have to worry about with our children. And I think that's such an important argument because so far it's been that there's not

been the awareness. Okay, so what? we have too much fluoride. You know, people say, we have too much fluoride in the system, especially public health advocates that and dentistry, you know, American Dental Association is like, okay, so we have a little extra fluoride, but they never weighted against the what you're losing, the consequences. Right. The potential ramifications that would come in.

And I want to mention just one study that you and I were geeking out a little bit when we, first decided to talk about this is that in the in jama the journal of the american medical association there was a study that came out in 2019 in august and it was quite controversial i referenced canada earlier and canada has some townships that have fluoride in the water and some townships that don't and from a public health perspective in terms of a study it's a beautiful trial because now you have a real true control population for the most part one acts one group is getting access to it, the other group is not getting access. And we'll have the link for this in the show notes along with the other studies that you mentioned. You did a really great job. Thank you for

presenting all that. Our team will write it up and link to it. This one's called the association between maternal fluoride exposure during pregnancy and IQ scores in offspring in Canada. And jumping to the conclusion of this particular study, tell us what this one found. It kind of references some of the IQ points that you had mentioned earlier. I don't know. if you have it in front of me in front of you so if I put you on the spot sorry right it's okay um that was a very controversial one because jamma published it i mean that was controversial in itself and and tell us why was that controversial that they published it well in the next episode he kind of explained it because they got a lot of flack i mean this is a big journal this is a very reputable journal and they published

it with a little bit of um i i read it a while ago with a with a little preamble saying you know what we weren't sure if we were going to publish this but we think it's worth while to start the conversation. And so I give them a lot of credit for doing that because they got a lot of flack. This is like the, you know, it would be like the American Medical Association publishing something controversial, like something against a discussion on vaccinations and maybe delaying vaccinations. It would be a big deal. And then the episode, the episode, the, the issue after that, There was a lot of flack. There was an editorial by the editor explaining why he did it and why he felt it was important.

The tipping point is coming, Drew. It really is. This lawsuit, you should hear how the judge speaks about all the data. And then you should also hear how the CDC and the EPA defends itself. It's such a weak defense. Essentially, they throw up their hands and they say, well, we don't have enough data. We don't know what the safe dosage is for fetal brain, for an infant, or even for an adult.

They admit that they don't know, but yet they continue to fluorida the water in this country. It's quite nuts, you know, because I just put up the study here in front of me. I'll just read the conclusions and the relevance in the study. This is a group, again, out of Canada, in the study, maternal exposure to higher levels of fluoride during pregnancy was associated with lower IQ scores

in children age three to four. These findings indicate the possible need to reduce fluoride intake during pregnancy. And one thing that, you know, again, the researchers, these researchers are at different institutions, universities. I forget where it was a female researcher that led this study, Rivica Green. And inside of the paper, she was saying, look, I know that this is controversial, but I just want to say that, you know, usually kids under a particular age,

I don't know when the first tooth comes in, but because we're seeing that these infants, you know, younger than four, ages three and four, we're having these IQ problems, and especially in men, which was really interesting, like specifically baby boys, had a bigger IQ drop than baby girls. Who knows why? But that was one of the findings that was there. She said, look, before the kids' teeth are fully formed and they still have baby teeth, there's really no reason to use fluoride. So even if you think that we're crazy, she didn't say it exactly this way, just give filtered water to babies because they don't even need it. They don't need the fluoride for their teeth at that time. It's not necessary for what they're going through. So I felt like that was the best that you could have the argument for

at the time. And it's really up to us as concerned citizens and yourself as a healthcare practitioner to highlight this, highlight these things so that people can make the decision for themselves and potentially advocate on behalf of those that don't have a voice and wouldn't ever come across this information. And remember, these are very easy studies. not easy, but they're very controlled studies because the proxy for the amount of fluoride that a pregnant woman is ingesting is not someone riding down, oh, I drank three glasses today. It is a daily measurement of fluoride in their urine. And that correlation is very, it's apples to apples. And so, and then comparing it to areas that don't have fluoride in their water,

measuring that urine level. I mean, these are pretty clean studies. It's just, it's all about picking the right person and the controls have been great. They've taken healthy people and then followed these children for a period of time. These are bona fide studies. People need to read about this. There's some videos online. The Fluoride Action Network has a great website, which I highly recommend. And so if you just want to kind of an overview of the studies, you could start there. There was also a study. Back to your comment about the boys being more affected, I noticed that as well. there's a Bassen challenge, I think they call it, named after a student at Harvard. Her thesis was that the fluoride levels above, well, the dosage at given in local water supplies,

plus a little added of fluoride from other sources like toothpaste and visiting the dentist, that young boys, their incidence of osteosarcoma, bone cancer, went up quite a bit more. And it was interesting because it went up more than young women did. So there are some gender differences, but it really doesn't matter. I mean, it's affecting us all. It is. It's affecting us all.

Let's take a step back for the folks who are listening here and dive into a little bit of the practical components around this. And there's a few categories that I want to touch on. One is the low-hanging fruit, which you've alluded to earlier, which is we, you know, it's so important to talk about this subject because even if we're at a place where we're listening to podcasts, where we have access to this information, where we're educated on this topic, there are so many people out there. And unfortunately, it's the ones who also are most likely the people that have been dying

from COVID, right? It's the ones who have the least access to health care. It's the ones that struggle the most. It's the inner city communities that don't have the ability or the time or the resources to dig into this, let alone by a water filter, right? That's why we even wanted to do an episode for this, for the folks that are aware that this hopefully should be a reminder. This is an important part of public health.

If you could do something to protect people, this is something you do to elevate everyone. For folks that do have some resources available to them, you talked about a filter, right? How do you talk about and how do you help patients navigate what filter to choose and how to pick it both for fluoride and other possible contaminants? It's a great question. And you're right about the socioeconomic aspect of this. In fact, in those studies, they adjusted for that as well. Yeah, I mean, I went out and bought a distiller, an industrial, a commercial grade distiller before Catherine was born. And, you know, that was pricey. even for me at the time, it was $1,800 and it needed maintenance. And basically that just evaporates water and collects it again, makes noise, you have to plug it in, it's a big energy user.

The good news now, and we've been promoting this on our affiliate store on AskTheDennis.com, and there are choices out there. There are products out there that will filter the fluoride, almost 100%. So it's easily done. This is a gravity-style filter, a lot like the Brita water filter, you know, where you've got that you put it all together you put a filter in you pour the water in is it the bravel do you feel comfortable naming it or like yeah yeah it's called zero zero zero water it's the same price as breeder it's uh it's got a bigger filter because it probably does more it's $39 maybe less $30 available

on amazon you know you have to it takes time you know it's gravity fed um a lot of people have I mean not all filters uh will filter fluoride that's the problem A lot of people ask me about, you know, those big chrome filters? I forget it's called, I think it's called Breville. No, sorry, not Breville. I forgot the name, but yes, yes. We'll bring it up. It's been around forever.

You have to buy an additional filter that will filter fluoride, and a lot of people aren't aware of that. So don't assume that all-Berkey is the name. Very good, thank you. That's it. And then reverse osmosis under counter is expensive. That's, you know, that can run you two, three grand, and you waste a lot of water using reverse osmosis,

of course, but that will grab most of the fluoride. But again, for $30, desktop, for the water that you drink that you put into baby formula, it is possible to get rid of the fluoride in your water. Now, we shouldn't be having to do this. The citizens of this country should not have to be taking out a neurotoxin out of the drinking water. But look at Flint, Michigan. I mean, there's other stuff in our water, arsenic. By the way, fluoride is very acidic.

It's an industrial byproduct that's put into water. So they have to buffer smaller water supply. Sometimes they have to add lime and things like that. But as it comes through the pipes, there are theories that it's pulling a lot of the lead and arsenic out of the iron pipes. So you're getting that as well. That was Flint, Michigan. Yeah.

So, I mean, it's, remember, in toothpaste, we're not getting the stuff that's coming off the top of the scrubbers. You know, that particulate matter that gets caught before it goes into the air. We are getting a pharmaceutical grade sodium fluoride or, sorry, calcium fluoride, either one. actually probably sodium fluoride as well. But we're not getting the hydroxyfluoracic, can't pronounce it even, fluoride version. That's the toxic product that gets put into our water.

That's what we're ingesting. Of course, it's watered down. It's measured in parts per million. But you would never see that in toothpaste because it wouldn't be allowed. You're getting a pharmaceutical grade fluoride. And it's a sodium fluoride. And sodium and calcium fluoride are found in the ocean. They're found in fish.

That's the nutrient that we see. in our environment that a little bit of may be good. But again, I wouldn't recommend drinking this stuff and I wouldn't recommend using a fluoridated toothpaste because we swallow it.

Kids swallow that toothpaste. It's so important. 41% of us in this country and it's less now since we measured 20 years ago. We have signs of being over fluoridated. The records in the teeth. We can see the spots.

You know, in the Indian tradition, historically, you talked about like fluoride impacting the pineal gland. And there's a lot of sort of theories and ideas. And I haven't looked into the research on this. So I am very much not informed on this particular topic. But one of the thoughts and associations is that the pineal gland is related to a lot of sort of things that would be connected to our higher growth, our spirituality, right? our sort of sense of awakening. And this maybe gets a little borderline sort of, you know, out of the realm of really this conversation.

But there's some thoughts that it's like, is this kind of making us less like good people, right? Are we attacking some part of our body, not from a conspiracy standpoint, but are we basically attacking a part of our body that's part of our higher growth? No, I think you're doing exactly what I do. it 30 years ago, you're questioning, and based on some knowledge that you have through Arivedic, you know, ancestral background and all that. And there's, there's, that's, that's, that's rich history. I mean, Arivedic medicine is very observational, but they've been doing it longer than we've been doing Western medicine, right? So essentially, you're doing what I did 30

years ago. You're questioning it. And again, fluoride for a few, maybe a few, a few, a few, a few, less cavities, but what are the ramifications? Pinole gland, IQ, neurotoxicity, arthritis, arthritis, bone cancer, I mean, who knows what else, right? That's what people need to start doing. They need to start questioning why we're adding this ingredient into the water. I mean, we're not putting vitamin A in there. We're not putting anything else in there. But fluoride is in our water.

We have to be not okay with it. We have to question it. So important. Let's go from filters. And again, we'll play some links to different filters that are out there on your stormer. There's a lot of really great solutions. We are not here to represent any particular filter brand. You know, more than anything, Dr. B is just showing you there's a lot, a lot, a lot of options that are out there.

And there's low-cost options that are out there for you to protect yourself. Let's switch over to toothpaste, right? So talk about toothpaste over here. You know, everybody remembers like the TV show commercials growing up, Colgate with fluoride and this. You've touched on it a little bit. But when you now make recommendations on toothpaste, what kind of toothpaste are you recommending? And do they have fluoride inside of there? Well, thank goodness.

And this is a recent development. We now have alternatives to fluoridated toothpaste. Let me back up a little bit. So I've done some research. I'm not clear, really clear, why they added and when they added tooth paste, sorry, fluoride to toothpaste. I mean, there's some record of it. It's not, the reasoning for it isn't very clear. I think it was a marketing thing because everyone was so high and just getting off the bandwagon of, oh, my God, this is one of the 10 greatest miracles in public health.

That's what they call it. That's what the NIH called it, fluoridated water supplies. And, you know, our kids are going to get less cavities. All you have to do is drink the water at home. It's free. It's cheap. And so they thought, okay, well, let's start adding fluoride to other things, right? Well, toothpaste obviously was on the list. And I'm not sure when that started, but I don't see any efficacy. I don't see any hard. data on the parts per million that they put into toothpaste, which is a thousand parts per million. That's about the same amount that's in water. It's actually a little bit more. And I see lots of data and have lots of studies on 5,000 parts per million actually helping on a topical basis of remineralizing teeth, reversing small cavities. But then again, we're swallowing this stuff. And we're getting it from other sources. We're just getting too much fluoride. That's why the CDC lowered the fluoride amounts in water because they realized, and again, they had to be pressured into doing this, they realized that fluoride was coming in from so many different angles. So that was lowered back

in, I think, 2015. But now we have this incredible product, this substance called, here it is, hydroxyapitide, right? Okay, we've known about this for a long time. It's in our tooth. It's biomimetic. It is the part of the structure of our tooth. It makes it the hardest substance in the body. It's a wonderful substance. It's natural. You can absorb it. You can swallow it. You can absorb it through your oral mucosa and not worry about it. And it's now available in toothpaste. It's been in use in Japan for about 30 years. The nanosized particles, actually it's another kind of spin-off of NASA. You can get nanohydroxide in nanosized particles. People get nervous with nano, but again, it dissolves, calcium dissolves. It's not like

nanotitanium, which is a metal that gets, you know, cordoned off by, you know, macrophages and parts of the immune system and are there in your body forever. That's not good. And, and then there's a micro size, which is just a more natural form of the hydroxyappetite. That is available in toothpaste now in the U.S. And it works. I have sensitive teeth. You know, if I don't brush with a very strong, fluoridated toothpaste or with this hydroxyapitite-based toothpaste, then I will, you know, my teeth will sing a little bit. They'll, they'll react to like cold, a cold drink or, or, you know, breathing in cold air and they'll ache a little bit. So, and that's, a lot of people suffer from that. That's, that's natural. So this is a great ingredient. It's safe. It's available.

The studies are remarkable. It's as good, if not better, than the uptake of fluoride. Remember I told you that fluoride, when it does get kind of part of the armor plating of the enamel, it's a wavy surface and it's a more brittle surface. And there is some data out there that says that teeth are more brittle in the last 30, 40, 50 years. It could be more grinding.

It could be related to, you know, sleep issues, which goes back to facial development and diet and lack of breastfeeding, not really fluoride. But let's just say that fluoride, did its job. It worked well topically for a long time, but there's no reason to use it now in toothpaste because the hydroxy appetite is better. It's as good, if not better, of doing the job, of basically filling in all the areas that are decalcified, remineralization. You've heard that term. You've heard reversing cavities. You've heard that term. Hydroxy appetite does the same thing, slightly better, and it comes out with a smoother surface. And there is some indication that your teeth look a little wider. It's actually a reflectivity issue. because the surface is more mirror-like rather than that wavy surface, and the teeth are less brittle. So fluoride is not natural.

It's time we just drop it. We added it. You have it in your bathroom. Get rid of it right now. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I feel bad. It shouldn't, don't flush it down the drain.

Don't put it back into the water. Yeah. Let it dry out. Open the cap. Let it dry out and throw it away. Yeah. Yeah. So great toothpaste.

I recommend too. I'm actually hoping to. names. It's a, Risewell, which is the micro form of hydroxy appetite. And they have a child's version,

which is great. It tastes great. Still has the hydroxy appetite in it. The child can swallow it safely, no problem. And then the one I use, personally, is called boca. I use their cocoa ginger flavor.

I don't like spicy, spear minty, minty, especially before bedtime, flavored toothpaste. And it works. If I don't use it often enough, the sensitivity comes back. It does recalcify the decalcified portions of root surface and enamel. It's amazing.

And it works. And you can have it delivered to your door automatically every three months. That's awesome. We'll make sure we link over to those guys. I always love, I don't know if it was you or another buddy, but I think the Boka team reached out at one point in time and just wanted to introduce himself. I love any entrepreneur that is taking the research and trying to bring. new alternatives to it that are fun and like good branding and you know things like that um so hats off to them for doing the work yeah the founder the founder of boca has moved to california he's just south of you

a few miles so i'll introduce you yeah yeah yeah always nice to chat with people we're doing fun stuff uh and if you aren't already sort of in the know you can go back to our previous episode that you and i did together where we've we've had a conversation with a few other uh dentists on here as well some colleagues of yours and friends of mine, you know, mouthwash. We've done a whole thing on mouthwash, you know, since we're on the topic of toothpaste, you don't want to kill your oral microbiome. It's super important. If you're using traditional mouthwash, get rid of it. There's plenty of alternatives. I think that company, Boka and some other ones that you just Google, ask the dentist mouthwash. You'll get all the recommendations. Especially if it has fluoride in it, right? Double whammy.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. You don't want fluoride inside of that space, inside of that space either. So we talked a little bit about protecting ourselves with a filter, a good quality filter. And just one more thing I want to say about filters, if you do have a reverse osmosis filter installed, I do at my house. There's a gentleman named William that I use out here in L.A. who did it. And I have a lot of other friends. And whether it's countertop or underneath the counter or whatever, the most common thing that I see that I just want to do as a public service announcement is that people forget

to change their filters. And when you forget to change your filter, and it's been like two years now, you are not only getting exposed to everything that normally came to the water, but that consolidation of all those chemicals, fluoride being one of them, that are stuck there in the filter. So put on a calendar alert, put it in your, you know, Gmail reminder, Slack reminder, whatever, but you've got to change your filter, right? That is such an important thing. We chatted before that we started out the conversation, Dr. B, by saying, you know, it's not a conspiracy. Well, we can't know for sure, but it's most likely not a conspiracy that fluoride is being added to the water. It's not the Russians or a homegrown sort of situation. It's good intentions, right?

People are looking stuff. It's bad data, but it's good intentions. Now, part of those intentions is maybe a lack of an understanding. understanding of what actually creates health in the body, what actually creates healthy teeth. And I would love for you to chat a little bit about the fact that separate from even, you know, this great toothpaste that you recommended, you know, what actually creates healthy teeth in the body? And what do we learn from past researchers in the space, like individuals like Weston Price? I think it's worth touching on that. We know it's not an absence of

fluoride. So let's just touch on that a little bit. No, it's a great question. And it really is the the root question in this whole discussion because we added fluoride. And again, as you said, best of intentions. It was not a communist plot. It was observational. And the dentist, in fact, the father of dentistry, Dr. Black was involved in this decision making early on when they discovered this modeling of the teeth. And then, but also in conjunction, with that, those kids were getting fewer cavities. So we really thought this was going to be a great thing. And everyone jumped on the bandwagon. And I have no ill will against my profession for that. But like anything, things change. And we need to keep checking in and finding out that we're

making sure that we're doing the right thing. So in terms of, I'm sorry, what was the question? Yeah, so the question is that, you know, back then, this dentist that you were taking a look at and everybody else, they were like, well, we don't know why. Just the same way that we don't know why people are getting fat and getting heart attacks and other stuff. So we're going to blame it all on fat. Right. Back then, it was like, we don't know why kids are getting all these cavities. Something must be missing. Let's add fluoride, right?

But what really causes cavities? What actually really harms teeth? And then on the flip side, what actually creates healthy teeth from the inside out? Right. So that's a great question. And it's a very important one. And once you know the answer to this, then the fluoride discussion becomes very clear. The root cause of decay is lifestyle and it's diet.

It's the choices you make in terms of what you eat. It could be a dysbiosis of the oral microbiome. There's a just like the gut microbiome, if things change with the populations of commensal and pathogenic bacteria, the bacteria that get along with each other, that's where you want to be. But as soon as one bacteria becomes a bully and is able to bully the commensal ones, that this can happen in the mouth as well, then things start going wrong. These bacteria become dominant.

And one of those bacteria is the strep mutants bug, that bug will start causing cavities. It will be fed by Western diet. It will be accentuated by a dry mouth, someone who's sleeping with their mouth open. pH changes. It likes the lower pH, the more acidic pH. So when you change that flora or that environment, whether it's in your nose or in your mouth, the armpit microbiome, the gut microbiome, things start going haywire. First thing that goes haywire is the immune system.

Teeth have an immune system. They fight off bacteria that cause deep. de-mineralization, cavities essentially. They are living entities. They have a blood supply. That's why a root canal tooth is so controversial. You just killed that tooth,

and a lot of things can come from that, a lot of very serious systemic infections, which I know you've talked about on your show so eloquently, and balanced. So essentially, the lack of fluoride is not the issue. That is not the root cause. And in fact, too much fluoride will give you more

cavities. That's something else we haven't discussed. If you get to a certain level of floresis, you're going to have all these holes and big cavities, you're going to need crowns and root canals. You may even lose some of your teeth over time. So really it's about just good nutrition, good living, grass-fed meats, a lot of vitamin K2 in your diet. K2 is very lacking in our diet. Minerals. Our soil is devoid of minerals. Mark Khyman talks about that in Food Fix. I loved that book. So you have to add minerals, but fluoride is not one of those minerals that you have to add. I mean, it's not a mineral.

So we are deficient in so many things. We have lifestyle habits, eating junk food, breathing with our mouth open, not being able to breathe through our nose, for other reasons. All of these things contribute to getting more cavities. The good news is that we're getting fewer cavities, at least kids are, than their predecessors, you know, two and three generations ago. And it's not due to fluoride because it's the same in non-fluidated countries, not to be confused and not to confuse the issue. So it's a multifactorial thing. It's like anything else.

Eat well, live well, stay away from the wrong foods and nourish. Don't kill that, don't try and take down that biome in the mouth. Toothpaste, unfortunately, does that. We have amulsifiers, surfactants. We've got mouthwashes with alcohol in it. and pesticides actually, very mild versions of it. Triclosan is an example of it. And these are all meant to disinfect the mouth.

Disinfecting the mouth is not the solution. Adding fluoride is not the solution. In fact, if you do both of those together, you've probably created a perfect storm. It's about nutrition, eating well, and making sure that the body has the right building blocks in its bloodstream, but also topically in the mouth, and that the environment in the mouth is able to do its thing.

Remember, biofilm, plaque, those should not be dirty words. The biofilm is there because this is the only inanimate object in the body that pokes out of the body. It's like having a bone sticking out of your leg continuously and the body being able to manage that. It can't manage that. The way the body does it in the mouth is it covers it with a biofilm. And that biofilm is part of the immune system and protection and the feeding layer, the nourishing layer for the tooth. such an important reminder and you know for anybody that wants to dig in further we chatted a little bit about dr weston price works he was way ahead of his time we've chatted

with other people and you know you look at these modern day hunter gatherer societies that are out there um i've shared multiple times on past episodes that i went to go visit one in kenya that uh actually interestingly primarily lives off of milk they they primarily live off of dairy they drink like four or five cups of dairy a day eat meat occasionally chew on twigs and berries and that sort of thing. They're cousins of the Maasai tribe. They're called the Samburu. And outside of the fact that, you know, dental accidents happen, and that's one of

the biggest challenges for these modern day hunter-gather tribes, you bite on something tough or the wrong twig or whatever, you can damage your teeth. And then, yeah, or fall. That's a big one. But outside of that, their teeth are perfect. They're white. They're clean. They have no access to any dentistry.

you know they have organ meats in their diet they're getting all the essential nutrients they have good fat soluble vitamins that they're that they're getting so k2 minerals exactly exactly so there's so much that we have to learn good facial development good facial development is the right shape totally airway yeah all those let me tell you a quick story please please let me tell you know a quick story. A lot of influencers have had that experience where they go like that Dr. Price experience where he was in Papua New Guinea, I think. And my experience was Nigeria. It was central Nigeria. I was there for six weeks. And I was a young dentist. And I went to a dental clinic. And of course, they heard that an American dentist was in town. And I literally walked in there.

It was a single room, thatched hut kind of clinic. It was charming, absolutely charming. and the dentist or the dental provider who was not a dentist was showing me all the utensils and instruments, the local anesthesia that he had. Of course, it was outdated. And then I looked out through the window, which wasn't a window, it was just a cut out in the little thatched hut. And I literally saw a line, maybe a half mile long of people, you know, ready to come in. I was, okay, great, no problem. I have six weeks. I can do this, right? So what I noticed, just short story. I'll make the long story short. It's a podcast. We got time for the long version.

They all had rampant decay. And I was very surprised by that because I was expecting the exact opposite from what I've read and other, you know, what we know what we know in indigenous societies and living out in the bush. I mean, they didn't have toothpaste. They were eating. They weren't eating the Western diet. They were eating just, they that they grew on the land and they were healthy teeth, the ones that were there, but they all had gum disease and they had a lot of decay. So I thought this is very strange. And I'm telling you the story because it doesn't always work out that way. The punchline is that it was epigenetics.

It was their environment. They, a plant and a non-Indigenous plant had grown. It was introduced by the Europeans about, I think it was was the Brits. I think it was the British during the colonial season. and it took over, and they also were brewing beer for the Danes, but that was a little bit further up, you know, further away. And so they were growing a lot of malt and barley and all that. So later I went into the village, and, you know, of course, I was surrounded

and they'd never seen a person like me and my wife, and it was quite an experience and nail polish, and the camera was freaking them out. And, of course, but they knew who I was, and we spent the night there, and we had meals with it, with them. The meals were very healthy, very interesting, very pungent. And then I realized after the meal, they were pulling out these little sticks and they were chewing on them. And I looked at that and I said, where did you get this? And so they took me where they, you know, where they get this and they

harvest it. And it's just big clumps. Short story now, turned out to be sugar cane brought in by the British. So it's really your environment that that's what I'm trying to say. It's your environment. You could be way out in the bush and there's something that has changed that's not normal, that's not native to your environment. And that is what caused all the decay. Yeah, they were indigenous, but they basically stopped living the way that they lived it before. Exactly. Just that one factor. Some of them were getting some barley and wheat, but that wasn't a big thing.

But even that could be problematic because if you really look at these modern day hunter-gather societies, they're not farming, right? They're living primarily off of eating, you know, porcupine and, you know, other stuff. The one I went to, they have been more into cattle. We're not native, you know, to that area. But they got very into domesticating cattle. But, but yeah, as soon as you get to like farming and you start growing that stuff, that's not really, you're not really a hunter-gather society anymore. Right.

Yeah. They enjoyed eating, they enjoyed chewing on the plant after their meal. it was a treat. Yeah, well, brought to them by Western Europeans. Tough. It's a really tough situation. And also just another reminder that, you know, we have a lot of practitioners who listen and so thankful for dentistry as a whole, just right?

You want to always give acknowledgement, the fact that we have access to things. People used to die back in the day, you know, falling and breaking a tooth and then that leading to an infection and other stuff that got out of control. So we're so lucky. end we can help every field of life elevate up and question things that are not making sense because just like you said the goal is to do no harm right you know it reminds me of um of a quote uh this is from a Nobel Prize winner German Nobel Prize winner you might have come across this quote quote his name is Max Planck have you heard this one before it's uh yes you basically

Plank Institute in Munich, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He said, you know, a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and new generations grow up that are familiar with it. What do you think when it comes to Floyd? If you were a betting man, do you see this as something being tackled in the United States and an effort to remove it from the water in your lifetime?

if you were a betting man? I think in 10 years we'll see some big changes. I'm really hoping for that. I think we are at a tipping point. If you had asked me 10 years ago, would this have been possible? I would have probably answered differently. This is a lifelong dream for me

to not see fluoride in the water. Put it in toothpaste, that's fine, with a warning label. Hydroxy appetite will outsell the fluoride, the market will take care of that. But fluoride in the water, being manned by the government, that's something that needs to be overturned.

that quote says it all, I think this generation will see change. And the people that are pushing this, PhDs, MDs, researchers, this is the big push. And they have so much credibility, the data is there. It stands on its own. It's going to happen. Powerful. But even if you question the data, just do what I did 30 years ago. I mean, that lesser of two evil argument, this is a simple no-brainer.

Take it out of your environment. Don't let your kids get to it. Don't let your fetus get to it. Get exposed to it. It's just not worth. Remember, all you're doing is maybe getting a few less cavities. That's it. That's the bonus that you get for all the worry that we're now discovering that

fluoride is contributing to our society. It's a powerful way to present the information. It's like, you know, what do you, for folks who are so, strongly holding on to the idea. It's like, what's really the benefit, right? Is the benefit even really worth it of the potential risks that would be there? Well, think about, think about mercury fillings in amalgams. Think about, I mean, dentistry has, look at root canals, those are controversial. We've got fluoride. We've got a lot of things that if we were just to say one day, you know what, we were wrong about that. I don't think that's, it's going to happen

that way. It can't. There could be lawsuits. It's the credibility of the, the profession. It's going to be slow change. It's going to be slow change. I'm hoping for 10 years. That's my best bet. Well, I want to believe in that too. So I'm hoping and the outcome of this lawsuit will be very interesting. He has not, he has not ruled yet. And I'm hoping Judge Chen, I hope he's listening. This is important for future generations of all our children in this country, he would have a huge influence. Well, we'll watch it closely. Dr. B. As always, a pleasure. I am so pumped, not just because of this conversation, but you're starting a podcast of your own. Tell us a little bit more about it.

When is it going to come out and where can people find it and everything? Thank you. Thank you for mentioning that. I didn't know you knew already. We're not trying to overthink it. It's asked the dentist. The premise is the same as it always has been. Someone asks the question.

I listen to the question. I answer it online. It's short. Hopefully it's to the point. I may venture out a little bit and interview some people and some interesting, you know, like James Nestor would be great, you know, people that talk about what we've been talking about. Maybe we'll get you on the podcast. We can talk about your dental experiences. Thanks for bringing it up. It's, it's been a lot of fun. I've always wanted to have a radio station. That just tells you how old I am, right? Now it's the podcast. Well, you have the voice. You also have the voice. You also have the the face for TV. You could do that as well, but you definitely have that voice. Yeah, that voice as well, too. Yeah. When is it going to launch? Have you already been doing episodes? Yeah. So I've got a whole bunch in the stack. We've got one out, one per week. It's been launched. It's on Spotify.

I'm not sure if it's going to appear on Apple podcast or not. I'm not sure how all that works, but it's very professional. We've got some people working on it. It feels good. It's still in its infancy. I'm getting great questions. One question really kind of made me think I had to sleep on it. I mean, it's, it's fun. Again, it's the premise that we've been working on my daughter and I for the last 10, 12 years. It's being able to ask a dentist empowering yourself so that when you do sit in the chair, it's not just like, okay, whatever you need to do, do it. It's more a conversation, for example, like fluoride. You know, the hygienist is about to paint fluoride in your teeth. You know what? I'm going to choose not to have that done. Clean my teeth. That's a great thing. I highly recommend it,

but I don't want to be exposed to the fore-eyed because it really doesn't work. I'm using hydroxy appetite at home. Totally. And it's also an education journey for them, right? As you mentioned earlier, when you're in dental school, medical school, any profession, you just don't have the time to maybe dig into all the data and look at contrarian opinions or ideas or things that are questioning, especially if they're emerging. So I know a lot of practitioners that use your website as a, as a resource. Thank you. And a lot of your listeners probably are thinking now, well, if I go say that to my dentist, I'm going to get a lot of pushback. And that's another thing we have on our website. We have a directory of functionally minded providers that you can have a discussion with.

You're not going to be shamed or some dentists actually fire their patients if they're not willing to take the fluoride treatment at the end of the profi. That does happen. So if you're curious, we've got, we're offering some alternatives. So there's a directory on our website of functionally minded providers. Yeah, the directory is great. I had a friend that moved to a new city and they were like, I can't find somebody over here. I was like, use this directory. Chances are you're going to find somebody and lo and behold, they did. Dr. B, you also have a book out that was kind of like we were talking about it a little bit before, right? There's a, there's a book that's out there. If people want to dig in more, can you, can you mention a little bit about it? Yeah, it's called the eight-hour sleep

paradox. It's a, it's a bestseller in the orthodontic category on Amazon. It's been out for five years. it's still doing very, very well. It's a real how-to. If you have any inkling or if you've been told that you snore, if you have an inkling that you are tired and that you may be suffering from some form of sleep disorder breathing, whether it's full-on sleep apnea or something less than that, this is probably the best go-to book, one of them at least,

where in four or five hours you can really navigate or understand how to navigate the system. It's very confusing to people. first self-diagnoting but knowing what they're suffering from and there are lots of checklists and it tells a story of what I went through my wife went through and so it's it's I'm still getting great reviews in that sense that oh my god if I hadn't read this book I wouldn't have been able to accelerate the process and get treated so I'm still very proud of that book and it was early on this area now we're talking a lot more about maltaping thanks to james nester

and other folks out there. But you were early on this category, and I just want to hats off to you. We will link to our podcast that we did. That's still one of my favorite podcast that we did a couple years ago when the podcast was first switching over to video. So we'll link to that if people want to listen more.

And you're on social media, Instagram. And some places. Your daughter is part of your team. She helps you out. You guys put out great content, a lot of really fun information. Family business. Family business.

And we get to, we've got grandchildren. children now we can experiment on, you know, no fluoride, lots of hydroxy appetite. It's a little family enterprise, absolutely. And it's a lot of fun. It's great. Well, you do make it fun. And I want to acknowledge you for all your great work and for just being willing to take people on that education journey. There's a financial health author, Dave Ramsey, that was pretty impactful for me when I was getting out of college and trying to get sorted out with my financial life. And he says, you know, when you're looking for people from advice, look for people who have the heart of a teacher, that they're willing to, like, sit with you, take you down the education journey, not blame you,

not shame you, not say, like, you should know about this, not ridicule you for believing one thing. There's mindiness. And so I just want to say you very much have that heart of a teacher. And thank you for coming back on the local brain podcast. Thank you. Every health care provider should be a teacher first, then a healer. Absolutely. Well said.