Podcast conversation (late Sept 2025) focused on dental health and women’s wellness, with a significant segment criticizing fluoride use. Speakers (including Dr. Betty Murray) argue functional medicine practitioners avoid fluoride, recommend simple oral-care alternatives (toothbrush+water, salt rinses), and raise ethical objections to water fluoridation (nonconsensual mass medication, uncontrollable dosing). The speakers claim some studies link higher fluoride exposure to lower child IQ and cite a National Toxicology Program meta-analysis that could not determine a safe fluoride level.
All of my functional medicine practitioners that are sending me patients do not want their patients to be using fluoride. And the good news is you don't need to use it. There are things that we can use that are as effective but have a much, much lower systemic risk. Things to avoid are anything else that's complicated or confusing. Like if things are healthy, if you have a healthy mouth in general, then you literally don't even need toothpaste. You can just use a toothbrush and water. So it can be that simple. As simple as rinsing with salt water. So simple as best when you need tools, when you need extra help, look for just these safer but still really effective ingredients.
So that's really. I think people are probably like, what does she just say? Salt water and a toothbrush? Like, we've always been kind of led to believe by advertising and the companies that make these products that you need all of these detergents, you know, and.
It'S really good marketing, isn't it?
Yeah, it is. Yes, it is. So, so that is really interesting. So, so. So some of my listeners may not know the controversy around fluoride because there's other countries that don't have it in their water. Right. So tell. Tell us a little bit about that in case they don't know the kind of controversy and why we're worried about it.
Well, I have huge ethical problems with adding fluoride to the water because it really is like it was potentially, I want to assume, the best in people. We assume public health officials had good intentions. They noticed that areas that naturally had higher levels of fluoride, that the people in those communities naturally had fewer cavities. So they said, hey, if a little bit of a good thing is a good thing, maybe more of a good thing is an even better thing. And so they started experimenting with adding fluoride to the water supplies in different communities. The problem is, the source of the fluoride is typically this fertilizer byproduct. It's highly, highly caustic. This highly, really unsafe. I've had people in water plants tell me that they don't even let their. Their employees touch the stuff because it's so dangerous. So they use this byproduct to add to the water. The intent when you're adding it to the water is as a medical treatment. There's no other reason that it gets added to our water supply. So if we're performing a medical treatment, I don't know about you, but when I was in school, I was taught that A medical treatment required consent. And when you're adding something to the public water supply, there is no consent. And not only that, you can't control the dose. So what Grandpa Joe is getting when he has one glass of water a day, his dose of fluoride is going to be entirely different than a 10 pound infant whose primary diet is formula mixed with tap water. Yeah, vastly different levels of fluoride and we have no control either way. And so they're noticing now in, you know, after it, after the CDC deemed this like the best public health advance of the 20th century, some people actually had some critical thinking skills and started to look and see. Oh actually yeah, cavities have decreased in the United States after we added fluoride to the water. But huh, it also decreased in other countries where they didn't add fluoride to the water. So the rate of tooth decay has gone down regardless of whether there was fluoride in the water or not. So it looks like you can't really credit fluoride with, with the decrease of cavities, just like a lot of other communicable diseases that we talk about, like measles that was decreasing in the 60s before certain medical advances were brought to the public. So it's really interesting that it's maybe not as effective as a tool as we once thought it was. And then more people in other countries, not here because in the United States prior to this administration, questions were not asked, were not allowed to be asked. So in other countries they started looking and studying and doing more research around what do the I, what is the IQ of children look like in areas where there are higher levels of fluoride? And sure enough they're finding that there's a significant decrease in IQ in our kids, especially boys, when they have higher levels of exposure to fluoride. So obviously there is still research being done, there are still studies being done even in our own country. The National Toxicology Program wrote this study. It was a meta analysis, a study of studies where they said they could not determine what the safe level of fluoride is for our kids and for the general public. That study was blocked from being published until a judge said no, no, you actually have to publish this. And that's really what started this snowball that hopefully is going in the right direction now where we're getting this information out to the public which hopefully will encourage more studies to, so that we can actually know the risk level at certain dosages because we really don't know what is a safe level for each specific person in each scenario.
