Expert Interview: The Truth about Fluoride

Dr. David Kennedy

Dr. Kennedy is a world recognized expert on fluoride toxicity, retired dentist, and past president of the IAOMT.  He is also the author of the book, How to Save Your Teeth.

In this interview, Dr. David Kennedy finally puts to rest this often misunderstood subject of the safety and benefit of fluoride. (And if you like this interview, be sure to also check out Dr. Kennedy's second World Summit interview, "Fluoride Solutions – Tips and Techniques to Live a Fluoride-Free Life, Including How to Raise Cavity-Free Kids!".)

Separating the science from the hype and quoting sources throughout the interview, Dr. Kennedy expertly details why we should avoid fluoride.

Questions discussed include:

• What fluoride does to the body?
• What are the major points of exposure to fluoride?
• Who is most at risk?

The passion Dr. Kennedy shares in this very engaging interview is very moving!

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Interview Transcript

Healthy Mouth World Summit
Guest: Dr David Kennedy
The Truth about Fluoride

Will: The next expert to share with us here at the Healthy Mouth World Summit is Dr. David Kennedy. Dr. Kennedy is a retired dentist and author of How to Save Your Teeth. His YouTube channel has almost a million views. Dr. Kennedy is the past president of the International Academy of Oral Medicine and Toxicology, has degrees in comparative biochemistry and physiology, and a doctorate in dental surgery from the University of Missouri.

He is a world lecturer to the dental profession on the safety of dental materials in the human body. His lectures include, among others, addresses to the World Health Organization, the American Dental Society of Europe, and the German and Brazilian versions of those dental groups. More recently, in 1996, he was a presenter at the International Society for Fluoride Research Conference on fluoride in Budapest, and in 1997 was involved in the Canadian Dental Association Conference on the use of fluoride drops and tablets.

To this day, Dr. Kennedy spends his time educating the public on what scientific research exists on the safety of dental materials. The title of Dr. Kennedy’s presentation today is “The Truth about Fluoride.”

Dr. David Kennedy, welcome to the Healthy Mouth World Summit!

Dr. Kennedy: Good! Glad to be here!

Will: We are honored to have you here with us today to present some of your research with us. Just a note for our listeners, Dr. Kennedy has been one of our main mentors for our studies. His book How to Save Your Teeth was where we first came across the information about Dr. C.C. Bass and the Bass Brushing Technique.

And, I also want to apologize up front that when Dr. Kennedy gets going, I tend to start laughing from his humorous, straightforward, extremely well-documented, insightful, and sometimes cynical comments and perspective. So, I hope my laughter won’t interfere with the recording. I’ll do my best to mute my mic while you’re talking, Dr. Kennedy, so we can get a quality recording of your interview here.

So, before we get into the details about fluoride, let’s set down a baseline of understanding so our listeners can grasp the importance of this information. Why is understanding the risks of fluoride and the truth about fluoride important for our readers?

Dr. Kennedy: Well, fluoride is what’s called a xenobiotic. It’s a poison. Xenobiotic or anti-life, it kills or damages almost everything it comes in contact with. So, the fact that you can brush your teeth with it and ostensibly lower your tooth decay rate should not be considered in a vacuum.

Why does it do that? It does that because it’s harmful to the germs that live on your teeth. And the reason is these same reason it’s harmful to your body. It inhibits every enzyme known to mankind. It damages the mechanism whereby your body makes energy. It damages the mechanism whereby your body makes teeth, bones, brains, blood vessels, arteries. It damages every single system that your body has. So, the fact that if you brush your teeth with a deadly poison slightly reduces the number of germs that are alive on your teeth should be a cause of concern rather than a tremendous, “Oh, wow! Isn’t that good?!”

What if I invented an arsenic toothpaste? Would you want to go brush with that? It would be just stupid. So, the fact that the dentists believe that is an example of how corporate America and the military industrial complex has compromised the dental profession. They were only able to do that because dentists do not understand toxicology at all.

Will: From your experience and research, what percentage of the public have fluoride concentrations in their body that negatively impact their health?

Dr. Kennedy: Well, if they’re in the United States, one hundred percent! One hundred percent, unless they’re making an extremely vigorous effort to avoid it. If you go dig up the bones of Native Americans or Native Hawaiians or Native Africans that live in the Outback of the Australian desert — the Aborigines — and measure their bones, they have a very low level. It’s maybe as high as two hundred parts per million or maybe even lower than that if they were like the Hunzai, the long-lived people that lived in the mountains and drank basically distilled water that is extremely pure.

So, those are what long-lived, healthy people have in their bones. And your bone is the record of your lifetime exposure. And then, if you go look at Americans today, we have between 2,500 and 5,000 parts per million in our bones. Well, toothpaste is 1,000 parts per million and it makes the little germs living on your teeth choke. So, you think having bones that are two- to five-times that high makes your bones brittle? Makes your joints arthritic, increases the mineral content and lowers the tensile strength, so you’re more likely to have a hip fracture, joints replaced, all manner of disorders. And, you know, it gets into the marrow, and then you have a lower blood count.

There is just so much wrong with swallowing a deadly poison. The fact that your body can deal with it at all is testament to the fact that it’s been around since the planet was formed. But, having some corporate entity encouraging us to swallow more is just flat insane. I don’t know why people don’t ask them the simple question, “What dose do you recommend?,” because the recommended dose is zero.

So, you know, oh, well why do you put it in the water? Oh, because it works topically. Well, I don’t like water that splashes on my teeth and makes the germs that happen to be there choke to death. And that’s a lie anyway. It has to be much higher than the level of water.

But, when you swallow it, it goes in your bones, and it accumulates. If you swallow two molecules right now, one will end up in your bones the day you die. Half of if sticks in your body virtually forever. If you’re a young person, you can get rid of a little bit more. But as you get older, you get rid of a lot less. So, figure half of it’s going to stay there the rest of your life. So, the only way you can avoid having way too much in your bones when you’re a geezer is to avoid it like the plague.

Will: Do you find that most folks are not aware of the risks of fluoride?

Dr. Kennedy: Not only are most folks not aware, but they believe the opposite. I had a dentist friend of mine, we were driving back from Newport, Rhode Island. And he was brushing his teeth in the car, and instead of spitting out the window, which probably would have made a mess on the car, he swallowed it. And I said, “You’re not supposed to swallow that stuff!” And he says, “Oh, yeah, I got a systemic dose of fluoride, too! And, it’s good for my teeth!”

And I said, “Well, you know, let’s look that up.” And according to the Center for Disease Control 2001 review of Morbidity and Mortality Weekly — that’s how they talk to the profession — they said it’s affects are almost entirely topical after the tooth erupts. And these are the people that like the stuff. They make their living promoting it. And they say it works topically, it’s like sunblock. Will you drink sunblock because you might get a sunburn?

Will: So, what if we haven’t used fluoride for many years? Is fluoride a substance that hangs around in the body well after we’ve stopped exposing ourselves to it, or are we just kidding ourselves to think that we’ve stopped our exposure to fluoride just because we don’t use fluoride toothpaste any longer?

Dr. Kennedy: Well, you’re kidding yourself if you think you’ve quit getting fluoride because you quit using toothpaste because you might have a glass of Welch’s grape juice, which is 6.8 parts per million fluoride. Or you might have a Coca Cola. The pesticide residue in the syrup makes Coca Cola made with distilled water unacceptably high. And, I’m not just picking on Coke. You could say Pepsi, or you could say Mountain Dew. It doesn’t make any difference. The stuff is ubiquitous.

If you put it in the water, which Americans have done in seventy percent of the water supplies in this country, that basically contaminates every beverage, every can, fruit, vegetable. It’s widely used as a pesticide. They use a form called sodium aluminum fluoride. And so, when you see the planes with the two wings flying over the field and they’re spraying something, well, there’s a good chance, especially if it’s a sweet juicy fruit, it’s a good chance it’s sodium aluminum fluoride cryolite, which ends up in your grape juice. That’s why Welch’s is so high. It’s not an organic grape juice, so they end up with a pesticide in there. But that also means that if you’re not drinking organic wine, you end up with exactly the same thing in your organic wine.

But people say, “Oh, I don’t drink wine. I don’t drink grape juice.” But, it’s not about you and me. It’s about the children. And you see these little children who are drinking the juices out of the box. Well, you take that box and read on it, it’s sweetened with white grape juice. So, all those little boxed beverages are extremely high in fluoride. So, if you allow the children of this nation to be damaged by fluoride, it lowers I.Q.

A huge new study from Harvard — and it wasn’t a study. It was a review. They did over 100 animal studies and over 20 human epidemiological studies. And they calculated that fluoride exposure lowers I.Q. And, of course, the pundits that are in favor of fluoride say, “Oh, well, you know, it’s just a little bit of loss of I.Q. and only a little damage here and there.” And, perhaps they’ve lost a few I.Q. points already themselves.

But, what’s more interesting than the study was how Choi — that’s the name of the author, and Harvard was the university — was published in the National Institute of Health Environmental Health Perspectives. You can get it online. It’s free. And, so if you look under “Choi 2012,” you’ll get the review.

Get the addendum. In the addendum, she explained all of the studies that they didn’t include in the review. There were over a hundred studies, and they selected only the very best out of the hundred studies. Well, a lot of the other studies, although they didn’t control for some of the variables, showed a much greater impact of fluoride than the ones that she finally ended up using in her review, she used only the premier studies.

So, a very careful review shows that fluoride impacts the intelligence of human beings. And most of these studies were done in communities that don’t have fluoridated toothpaste. Well, you get half your exposure if you’re brushing with a fluoridated toothpaste. Children don’t know how to spit. Anybody who has raised children know that babies only know how to suck.

So, if you’ve ever been in the living room where a baby picked up a penny off the floor, you can see the mother come off the couch at the speed of light. It would make The Bolt look like he was a little slow. And, so, they dash across the floor and grab that penny from the baby’s fingers because they know the next thing it’s going to do is it’s going in the mouth, and then down because that’s all babies know how to do.

So, anything you put in that child’s mouth to clean their teeth, it’s going to go down. And that’s why it’s so insane that parents are using fluoridated toothpaste on small children. It says on the box, it has the same label on the box that you would find on a loaded .38-caliber pistol. It says, “Keep out of reach of children.” Well, they’re not kidding! Keep out of reach of children because this is a deadly poison! There’s a lethal dose of fluoride in a family-sized tube of toothpaste for, like, a 40-pound child. I’m sorry! I don’t think that should be in the medicine cabinet!

Will: So, really there are two main issues here, it sounds like. One is water fluoridation and the implication of food contamination from water fluoridation — and we’ll get into that later — and the other is using oral hygiene products containing fluoride. So, can you start by please explaining what fluoride is? What does the dictionary have to say about fluoride?

Dr. Kennedy: There are three issues. You only got the first two. The third one is pesticide residue. And so, water fluoridation is mandated by states and/or cities. And that is a political action that was taken up in the 1945 era because we had literally hundreds of millions of tons of this stuff to get rid of because of making the nuclear bomb. It’s a byproduct of making a nuclear bomb. And they had to get rid of it somehow, so they said, “Let’s tell people it’s good for their teeth, and we’ll put just a little bit in the water and off it goes. It won’t hurt anybody.” That was their belief. So, water fluoridation is one issue.

What you brush your teeth with is another issue. And then, whether or not our regulatory agencies can control the amount of fluoride in our diet from pesticide residues is the third issue. And, so, the third issue is actually part and parcel of the water issue.

The Environmental Protection Agency has developed what are called minimum rinse levels, MRLs for fluoride. And they’re enormous. They’re way above the level that’s known to harm infants, for example. And, for the most recent review of fluoride by the National Research Council, that’s the scientific arm of Congress, when the government has a question, they ask the National Research Council to put together a committee of experts. They put 12 experts in fluoride together and ask them if the Environmental Protection Agency’s public health goal — or they call it MCLG — maximum contaminant level goal. This is the level of fluoride in drinking water that will never cause anybody any harm ever.

And so the EPA developed a phony standard that said that you could have 4 parts per million fluoride in your water for a lifetime and have no adverse affects. My wife and I filmed a documentary in China of people that are crippled at 4 parts per million. So, the likelihood that the EPA standard is correct is nil because the people in China do not use fluoridated toothpaste. They do not have pesticide residue on their food.

So, the other two sources of exposure are completely absent. And yet they became crippled at 4 parts per million. So, the National Research Council recently acknowledged that in 2006. So, our documentary was 1999. So, we beat them by 7 years. I always like to be ahead of the curve.

So, unfortunately since 2006, the Environmental Protection Agency has not changed it’s MCLG. So, even though my documentary in 1999, the National Research Council in 2006, what we have in Washington, DC are people whose feet are stuck in cement. They don’t want to change the standard because it’s beneficial to industry, especially industries that leak this stuff into the waterways.

What if you had a computer manufacturing system, and you were etching circuit boards? How do you etch the circuit board? You etch it with fluoride. Well, what do you do with it when you’re done? You wash it off. What if you had a car wash and you had cars that came in that were all nasty and dirty and the wheels were all crummy from the brake pad residue? What do you do? You squirt it with fluoride so that it dissolves all that road fill off the car because fluoride will dissolve concrete. So, obviously, it’ll take brake fill off your car. So, your wheel cleaners are fluoride-based products.

What do you do with that? You wash it down the drain. So, our waterways in this country are highly contaminated with fluoride. But, because we have the Environmental Protection Agency, with their ridiculous MCLG, it’s okay for the sewer water to be 4 parts per million because that’s okay, right?! And so, we’ve got 3 sources of exposure, and they’re way, way too high. I’d rather go like the Hunzai with the minimum exposure and no toxic stuff.

You asked me what the definition of fluoride was. So, the definition of fluoride, if you’ve got a Webster’s dictionary, is fluoride is a violent protoplasmic poison. It’s the thirteenth most abundant mineral on the planet. So, let me help you define what violent means. That means it’s really bad for you. Protoplasm, that is you and I. We are protoplasm. Poison means it’s going to kill you. So, Webster’s got it right. Violent protoplasmic poison.

Will: So, what exactly does fluoride do in the body? In other words, why is it so dangerous?

Dr. Kennedy: Well, in any mammalian system — mammals, that’s what we are — there is no known use for fluoride in any mammalian system. So, the first question is does fluoride do anything beneficial in the human body? And the answer is no, it doesn’t do anything beneficial.

So, what does it do? Your body has no use for fluoride. So, your body has been trained, basically, that fluoride is going to kill you. So, it’s got to get something that’s got calcium in it and hook the fluoride to it to make basically calcium fluoride.

Calcium fluoride… I used to have a rock, beautiful. I went into a lapidary store one time and they had this beautiful green-blue rock. I had to buy because it was calcium fluoride. And, so, calcium fluoride…I wouldn’t lick it. But, calcium fluoride is a beautiful rock.

So, when people say, “Oh, well, it’s natural, fluoride,” I say, “This is natural fluoride.” It’s a rock. And it’s not in your water. What’s in your water is unnatural fluoride. It’s a manmade product. I’ll get to that in a minute.

But, anyway, calcium fluoride is what your body tries to do with fluoride. It tries to take this free fluoride ion that’s floating around in your bloodstream because you’re brushed your teeth or drunk some of the wonderfully adulterated city water. And, now it’s going to try to hook that up to something that’s not vital to your life because if it floats around in your body, it’s going to inhibit every single system in your body. It’s going to inhibit the way your body makes red blood cells, it makes teeth, it makes bone, it’s going to inhibit that.

So what it does, it looks to calcium-rich tissue, which is your bones, and it hooks it up to the calcium in the bones. What happens is that the bones fill up. Your bones are not unlimited in their quantity of calcium. And, also, as the bones remodel and turn over, it releases that fluoride back into your system again. So, if you were exposed to a lot of fluoride when you were a kid, that bone turnover keeps exposing you for decades.

So, it has a fairly weak system of protecting you. It only gets about half if it sequestered. The other half of it goes out through the urine. But, if you’ve got bad kidneys, then you get less than half out through the urine. So, as the kidneys’ function decline and the ATSDR — that stands for Agency for Toxic Substance Disease Registry — they said that the elderly are particularly at risk for fluoride exposure. And that’s because your kidneys decline in their function as you get older. And it’s probably the reason God gave you two. Because by the time you get kind of old, you’ve only really got one because they’re both working at half capacity.

And then one out of nine people in the United States today have what’s called kidney deficiency. So, those are people who are working well below capacity. And so, those people are the people that accumulate the most fluoride in their bones. And, actually, in the National Research Council, they even mention people that were kidney deficient or on dialysis, who were particularly at risk because they don’t have the ability to get as much fluoride sequestered in their bones or out of their bodies as a normal, healthy person would.

Will: I think you’ve pretty much answered my next question here. At what levels of concentration does fluoride begin to have this impact on the body? You talked about the EPA level being way too high. Do you have anything to add to that at this point? What levels of concentrations does fluoride begin to have this impact on the body?

Dr. Kennedy: Well, yes, I do. The first thing is that you have to take the EPA’s four parts per million, which is the concentration of water, and you have to translate that to dose. And this is the thing that dentists are so ignorant. If you ask a dentist, “What dose of fluoride do you recommend?”, they’ll give you a concentration.

Well, concentration is how much is in the water tower. It’s got nothing to do with how much goes in your lips. In order to calculate dose, you need to know how much of that water at that concentration you drink and how much your body weighs.

So, for example, a baby drinks its weight in water every four days on average. Well, wait a minute. Think about it. The average human being weighs 70 kilograms. And, so, if you had one part per million fluoride in the drinking water, and you were going to drink your 70 kilograms of water every four days, let’s see… 70 divided by 4 goes in there one time and you get 30. And four will go into 30, what do you get? Seven or eight times? Seven something. So, let’s just call it seventeen. So that means to get the same dose of fluoride, you’d have to drink 17 liters of water a day if the water was one part per million. I’m sorry! I think that’s an enormous amount of water! I drink 3 or 4 liters of water a day. And I’m considered a heavy water drinker. So 17?

So, anytime you put a concentration in the water supply and you have a population out there, some of them drinking 17 liters of water a day, others drinking 3 or 4 or 2, then you are basically giving one group a huge dose compared to the other. No medical authority on the planet recommends you give a baby 17 times more of anything than you’d give the adults. I’ve just gotta tell you that that’s insane. If I gave the baby 17 times more aspirin than the adult dose, you’re going to kill the baby.

So, we’ve got a horrible devil health program in this country, one that is completely phony, that is costing this nation a gazillion dollars to have 35 doctors at the Center for Disease Control who are making handsome salaries to go out and promote that we put chemicals in the water supply at a concentration. And that concentration is at a level that’s known to harm infants.

We were talking a minute ago about the National Research Council. If the infant is deficient in iodine, the dose that causes harm to iodine-deficient infants is .03 milligrams per kilogram. So, people understand that’s written like you might write money. .03 is like 3 cents.

And so, an infant on a bottle, say, a 4-kilogram infant drinking a liter of water a day would be like written like a quarter, .25. So, if 3 cents is going to harm an iodine-deficient infant, giving that baby twenty-five cents worth of fluoride is stupid! And, I think it’s unethical and immoral. And that’s what we have 35 people whose job is promoting oral health in the Center for Disease Control, and that’s all they do. They don’t promote oral health. They promote fluoride in the drinking water.

And, then we go over to the Public Health Department, and there we have another 50 or so people whose job is to promote fluoride in the drinking water. But, wait! That’s just Washington, DC, the Vortex of Evil! We’ve got, also, 50 different states with public health dentists in all 50 states. And they see their job as promoting fluoride in the drinking water. So, we’ve got another 500 people promoting that.

And then, we’ve got all of the Indian reservations, all of the Native Americans’ reservations are fluoridated. And the dentists on that reservation are encouraging them to continue to use fluoride at high levels. All of the military reservations are fluoridated. Military reservations, military bases are fluoridated, including the one in Hawaii. And, so, now we have all of the military personnel exposed to fluoride because of a government action costing you tax dollars.

So, it adds up into the many billions of dollars. I think I know what’s wrong with Washington, DC. They seem to want to worry about where all the money is going. But they don’t seem to want to worry about where all the money is going. So, they pretend to worry about where the money is going, and then they look the other way when it’s clearly damaging their nation. I don’t think that’s morally responsible. I don’t think that’s what we’re electing them to do. So, when they want to really improve the nation, they’ll start looking to see where all the money is going because it’s not going to the things you and I want it to go to.

Will: Well put. So, you covered definitely who’s most at risk, as well as the main sources of fluoride exposure. Are there different forms of fluoride used for fluoridation compared to oral hygiene products?

Dr. Kennedy: Oh, yes! Because of the idea that fluoride is fluoride is fluoride is fluoride. I’ve actually got a videotape one place of the lobbyists saying that, trying to equate fluoride with the stuff you find in your toothpaste with the stuff that they put in the water supply.

The toothpaste is usually a sodium fluoride. At one time it was stannous fluoride or tin fluoride and/or monofluorophosphate fluoride. So, these are relatively pure ingredients. They don’t contain the arsenic and the lead and the cadmium that the water treatment chemicals do. What they’re adding to the water supply is only 17% fluoride. So, anybody that’s really good at math is going to say, “Well, gee, 17% fluoride, there’s 83% something else, isn’t there?!”

Well, what do you want to know that for? Is usually the answer. So, there’s a number of letters from responsible water agencies to the suppliers of these chemicals who ask for a list of ingredients, and generally they will refuse to give them because there’s a fair amount of liability in saying we’re shipping you arsenic.

But, they’re required by law to measure their chemicals. So, all of the chemicals that we’ve measured so far contained substantial amounts of led, arsenic, cadmium, mercury, and a potpourri of other things in countries that are making nuclear weapons. The radioactive products have been removed like China’s that have very low radioactive products. The United States has made all the nuclear weapons they want to. Mexico doesn’t make nuclear weapons. So, from other countries that are not making nuclear weapons, they still have the radioactive byproducts in them. So, you not only have a potpourri of heavy metals — fluoride, arsenic, mercury, cadmium — but you also have radio isotopes because that’s how they made the original nuclear bomb is they extracted the uranium from limestone and then concentrated it to make the 235, which is the kind that blows up. There’s a lot of 238 around, and so they leave that in the water for you to drink, I suppose.

There’s nothing healthful about the product that they’re adding to the water. It’s raw, untreated hazardous waste from the phosphate industry. But the phosphate industry is basically the stepchild of nuclear production because they run a bulldozer in the mountain. They pull up limestone. They acidify it with phosphoric acid. It bubbles and fumes. They used to leak the fumes out into the atmosphere, but now they collect it. And that’s called the elixir from the pollution scrubbers of the phosphate fertilizer mining industry.

And that they concentrate down to the point where the silica fluoride — sand and fluoride — is up to 23% or thereabout. It’s 17% fluoride. But, wait a minute! I said another word: silica. What is that? Well, the fluoride, six molecules of fluoride are stuck to a molecule of sand. Well, you know, that stuff that your toes walk on on the beach? Who knew fluoride would hook to that? Well, fluoride will hook to everything. Every element known to mankind, fluoride will attach to it. It’s the bully of the periodic chart. It hooks to everything, including our bodies and sand and blast and concrete and cement and everything else.

So, that they have to truck or tanker to the water treatment facilities. And they line these tankers either with a special fluoride-containing resin or they used to use a one-inch thick layer of tire rubber. And they were lined with tire rubber. And after a year, they had to remove that tire rubber because it became so brittle, you could break it with your fingers. And if that tire rubber were to leak, then it would eat right through stainless steel. So, that’s how they get it, that wonderful elixir for your children’s teeth from the phosphate fertilizer mines in Florida to the water supplies near you.

Now, if you happen to be on the west coast of the United States, thanks to about three hurricanes that went through Florida and broke out the dikes that were holding up this wonderful elixir for our children’s teeth, and it washed into the everglades killing a huge section of the everglades, then there was a terrible shortage of silica fluoride. And China said, “Say, we’ve got some of that! We can fill in your needs.” And, so, China said, “We got some of that.” And Japan says, “We got some of that, too.” And, so, Mexico says, “Yeah, we got a lot of that.” And, so, the west coast of the United States is getting most of its water treatment chemicals for fluoridation from China, Mexico, and Japan.

Well, what’s the connection between those three countries? None of them allow fluoride in their public water supplies. So, they gotta get rid of it somehow. And burying it is costly. And so if they can sell it to American cities at a profit, that’s going to make them richer than Donald Chump!

Will: We’re going into the rabbit hole here, folks. Let’s turn to another subject here a little bit. What is dental fluorosis?

Dr. Kennedy: The definition of dental fluorosis is the first outwardly visible sign of fluoride overdose in children. The reason it’s important that you understand that it’s an overdose in children is that adults don’t get dental fluorosis. If you have all of your teeth formed when you were first overdosed with fluoride, it damages your bones and your brain and your kidneys and your heart and your blood vessels. But it doesn’t show up in your teeth. In order to see it in the teeth, you have to poison the baby and young adults because you can’t see teeth that are forming after about 8 years old.

So, the Center for Disease Control says, “Oh, don’t worry about fluorosis after 8 years old because you can’t see it.” Well, fluorosis is a very painful disorder. The major characteristic of fluorosis is pain. And that’s because it damages the ligaments and the bones. And, so, when you go to play baseball or walk or stand or sew or knit or whatever and the joints start hurting, start looking for something that’s accumulated in the bone that is poisoning that joint.

Well, the reason we can see it in the children is because the cells that were making those teeth made abnormal teeth. Instead of making beautiful, hydroxy crystalline apatite where the rods are all parallel… And I tell people, think of spaghetti in the package before you cook it versus spaghetti after you cook it. Well, the cells, instead of laying out that enamel in perfect straight rows like the package of spaghetti, it lays down a little bit of spaghetti, and then there’s a hole, and then there’s another little bit of spaghetti and then there’s a hole. And so the teeth have these funny-looking white spots on them when they first come in. And that’s because the cell was poisoned that was making that tooth. And, eventually those white spots become brown or green. I’ve seen even blue from a lady that liked beets.

But, anyway, whatever kind of food is going in your mouth on a regular basis is what’s going to soak into that tooth because instead of having a beautiful, hard, resistant tooth, it’s like the enamel on the sink that’s all worn away where it’s porous. And it picks up every kind of stain that goes by. That’s why we have all these bleaching stations at all these dental offices around the country trying to whiten these teeth back up because we now have porous teeth.

Well, the problem is that there’s lots of research showing that if you have caused the child to have funny-looking spotted teeth, that when you give them I.Q. tests, they’re lower in I.Q. When you give them neurological tests, they test neurologically impaired.

So, when you’re damaging the teeth — because fluoride is a xenobiotic — it poisons every enzyme system, it’s also damaging every other enzyme system in the body. It’s just you can’t see if you’ve got a damaged blood vessel. You can’t see if you’ve got a damaged brain. So, the fact that you can see damage to children’s teeth should be a cause of concern for everybody. And 41% of children in the United States show damage to their teeth.

I was at a city council meeting in Texarkansas. Unreasonably, a dentist got up and proclaimed that he had never, ever seen anyone with dental fluorosis, encouraging them to put fluoride in the drinking water.

Well, if 4 out of every 10 children that walked into his office had dental fluorosis, you would think that maybe he’s either lying or doesn’t know what it looks like.

When we have people like that out wanting fluoridation, it’s not surprising our elected officials will believe them. But, what you’ve got to tell them is it’s not a question of belief. That’s how religion is based upon belief. Science is based upon numbers. Forty-one percent, four out of ten children show visible signs of fluoride injury. So, that’s not a question of belief. That’s the numbers coming from the Center for Disease Control who are promoting fluoridation. Interestingly, Kit Shattuck said in the Wall Street Journal in 1998 when 22% of the children had dental fluorosis, “There probably is excess exposure.” And what did they do about it? They continued to earn handsome salaries for the next decade and a half. And they’ve managed to increase the number of children with visible injury from their program by 100%.

I think I can balance the budget. Those dentists at the Center for Disease Control should go hang up a shingle and start fixing teeth instead of lying to the public!

Will: So, when someone has dental fluorosis — you just covered this — the research shows that it’s not just the teeth. The mouth, once again, is serving as a window of what’s going on for the rest of the body.

Dr. Kennedy: What you say is correct. And one of the windows that was identified for me by the medical school in China, Sin Guofan, who was a co- author on that recent study by Choi I was telling you about that found the lower I.Q…One of the things the Chinese physicians reported was the fact that if a child has dental fluorosis, by the time they grow to adulthood — which they consider to be the forties — they’re much more likely to have crippling skeletal fluorosis where their joints are damaged.

So, what you’re really showing with dental fluorosis in a child is you’ve saturated that child with fluoride. That’s going to come back and haunt that child for the rest of their life with fluoride-related injuries.

What are those? Thyroid is the most sensitive. So, we have an epidemic of obesity in our country today. Well, what happens if you kill the thyroid? People grow up like the doughboy. So, it’s not rocket science why people aren’t metabolizing their food and why they don’t have energy, why they are sitting around playing video games instead of out riding their bicycles. If you damage the thyroid, children end up lethargic.

And that’s what Mullinex showed in rats. Rats do the same thing if you expose the rat after it’s born to fluoride, it ends up a couch potato that’s confused. If you expose the mother to fluoride at exactly the same level in the dam as a child would experience in a dental chair getting a supposed “topical” fluoride treatment, that when you measure that child’s blood level of fluoride when they’re getting that topical treatment, the blood level goes way up.

So, Mullinex used that blood level of fluoride in the dams to see if that was harmful to their fetus. And what she found was it caused a permanently neurologically impaired pup that was hyperactive. It was buzzing around the cage biting the other rat, biting the bars of the cage, completely abnormal rat.

So, maternal exposure damages the fetus. Post-gestation exposure caused a lethargic rat. So, maybe they should put more fluoride in the water so that these hyperactive rats will become lethargic. Well, we would call that Ritalin because that’s a fluorinated drug. Because we didn’t talk about the other source of fluoride. And it’s all of your psychoactive drugs, your Prozac, the diet drug, the Phen-Phen, the Fenfluramine that destroyed hearts. Ritalin that causes kids to sit in school and sit still. These are all fluorinated compounds.

Even the date rape drug Rohypnole is a fluorinated valium. So these are fluorinated drugs, and look what they all do. They knock out your brain.

Where else do you get them? Inhalation anesthetics. If you go to a hospital and have a general anesthetic that you inhale that’s halothane, flurothane, those are fluorinated compounds. So, there are actually children that end up with dental fluorosis that had a procedure when they were newborns — maybe a bad heart valve. I’m not saying they should’t do it. I’m just saying that their bones filled up so much with fluoride at birth from a medical procedure that by the time they’re eight years old, it’s still circulating in their bloodstream causing dental fluorosis.

So, fluoride is a poison. And you body parks it in your bones. And any source you get it from — drugs, pesticides, water, or toothpaste, it’s all the same stuff. But it’s not, because the stuff they’re adding to the water supply is called silica fluoride or hydrofluosilicic acid. That has another special component to it. There’s a patent in the U.S. Patent Office for silica fluoride to extract lead from brass.

So, if you had a cannon left over from the Civil War and you wanted to get your copper back, you soak that up in little silicofluoride and take all the lead out and you get your copper back. Well, it continues to do that in the water supplies because there’s now two huge studies with over 450,000 children showing that if the children are drinking fluoridated — optimally fluoridated, as the Center for Disease Control liars call it — municipal tap water. If they’re in a community that has that, they didn’t even look to see if they were drinking the water. They looked to see if they lived in a community where that was commonly available, they had a dramatic increase in their blood level of lead.

I’ll repeat that. If they’re in a fluoridated community with silica fluoride, their blood level of lead went up. Lead in the blood causes lower I.Q., causes violent behavior, causes learning disorders, decreases your chance for success in our society. And, it makes our society poorer as a result. We no longer lead the world in innovation, inventions. We lose our place in the world because we’ve damaged the children.

And, so, any patriot that wants to have a successful, healthy nation would make it their life’s work to stop the addition of silicofluoride to the diet of the children of this country.

Will: So, what actions have other nations taken regarding protecting their citizens from fluoride toxicity? In other words, do all nations fluoridate their water?

Dr. Kennedy: If you’re a liar, you can go to Germany. The Germans say “[speaks German].” If you go to Sweden, they don’t believe you. And, so, if you go all around Europe, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark…they don’t put fluoride in the water supply. It’s because our liars didn’t speak their native language. So, they did their own studies and they didn’t find any benefit. And, the one little town in Finland, Kuopio, Finland, put fluoride in the water supply. And, then, when our researchers found there was a huge increase in bone cancer, six fold in little boys that were drinking fluoridated water, Finland stopped. They didn’t say whether they found bone cancer. They didn’t have to. They said, “No. We’re not doing that.”

And, so, in Europe, there’s a town in Italy that has a high natural fluoride level. And the name of the town is the Black Tooth, Diente Negro. And so, it tells you what color their teeth are. And my uncle was raised in Dighton, Kansas, southwestern Kansas, which is on the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains. And the Rocky Mountains are granite. Granite is a high fluoride rock. So, if you go the eroded area where the rocks eroded over the last 100 million years, the well water in Dighton, Kansas was high in fluoride. And so he ended up with teeth that are about the same color as shoe leather. So, he could have been from Black Tooth, Italy, too, or Dighton, Kansas.

That also happened in Colorado Springs. And there’s a band of high fluorosis all the way down into Colorado and Kansas, Texas, Oklahoma. So, there’s a lie that those children had less tooth decay. And that made-up story is that when you actually look at the numbers, they have the same or more tooth decay. They also have more heart attacks. So, that’s having worked on my uncle’s teeth, I can assure you that they were not solid teeth. They were easy to drill. He had lots of cavities. He’d lost most of them. They broke real easy. They crumbled. But he was never shy about showing everybody his teeth. He had black teeth and he’s got a cigar sticking out of the corner of his mouth and he’d give you a big grin and say, “Yeah.” He was a business man. He was going to work a deal, so…

Will: So, let’s now shift to fluoride and oral health. What about the studies that show that topical application of fluoride on teeth makes teeth harder and protects against tooth decay?

Dr. Kennedy: Ask them for the reference because it doesn’t. Fluoride actually makes teeth softer. The only thing they can show you are two things. Is that if you’re putting a high level of fluoride in your mouth on a regular basis, it will reduce the number of viable bacteria in your mouth because of the same reason that it reduces the number of viable neurons in your brain and the number of healthy cells in your kidney and the number of cells that can make teeth in your jaw. So, fluoride poisons every cell in the human body. So, yeah, if you put a lot of it in your mouth on a regular basis, the germs that might rot your teeth, you can knock their numbers down.

So, I don’t consider that a benefit. There are a lot of things that’ll do exactly the same thing, only better and that are nutrients and nontoxic. And, so, I tell people if you can’t go to the kitchen and get something to clean your teeth, don’t clean them. Use saliva. Because what God intended your teeth to be cleaned with is saliva. And you can find every mineral that your tooth needs in your saliva.

Boy, I wonder how that happened! And, so, I’ve been brushing my teeth with saliva for 30 years. I’ve always got it with me. I don’t have to go to a store and buy it. It’s exactly the right concentration of minerals for my teeth to remineralize if I should happen to have a cavity. And they call it dry brushing, but the brush is only dry until I get it inside my mouth, and then it’s saliva brushing. So, really, it should be called saliva brushing.

I’ve got toothbrushes in my car. I’ve got them in the door pocket of my airplane. I usually carry them in my shirt pocket, but I don’t have it today. But, you know, that’s a tool that knocks the scum off your teeth.

So, what causes tooth decay? Eating sugar, — gee, is that news to anybody? — leaving the scum on the teeth, and having the bug present. Because I have had patients that had mountains of scum on their teeth and they didn’t have any tooth decay. And, I go, “Boy, all scum is not created equal!”

And, so, when you analyze that scum, and if they really wanted to reduce tooth decay in this world, they would have every kindergarten, grade school, nursery school kid spit in a tube. And if it turned purple, they would treat that child because that child has an infection that’s called streptococcus mutans. And you can kill it with lots of stuff. But, only one out of five children will have that bug. When you do DNA testing, that bug came from the mother or the caregiver. Sometimes, it’s granny. So, when people say, “Oh, tooth decay runs in the family,” it’s true. But, so does infection. It’s not genetic. It runs in adopted children, as well. It’s a bug. And you can kill it.

And so the good news is we know what causes tooth decay. The bad news is fluoride doesn’t kill it. Fluoride is not particularly lethal to strep mutans. There was a study in Puerto Rico, interestingly, at the dental school there with a pediatrician, Lopez. And she got tired of seeing babies with rotted teeth. Now, you talk about something that’s really sad is a little infant two years old to have half a dozen rotted teeth in the front of their mouth. And this is called baby bottle tooth decay or early childhood caries. And it’s a terrible disease because what do you do for that? You can’t say, “Open wide and give them a few shots.” They’d make noise and you’d hear them to the next block. And so, they usually end up working on them under general anesthetic. The baby teeth are so small and tiny, the end up jerking those teeth out so the kids walking around with no front teeth for the next 5 or 6 years until their permanent teeth come in. So, it’s a terrible disease. She got tired of seeing that all the time. And one of the things about Puerto Rico is they think sweet milk is a nice thing to give the baby to go to bed so they take a tablespoon of sugar and put it in the baby bottle of milk at bedtime and put the baby to sleep with that.

Well, you know, the sugary milk is going to lie on the teeth, and it just rots those little babies’ teeth right out of their head. So, she took 100 or so babies and divided them up into three different groups. One group got placebo. One group got four parts per million fluoride made from tea, same as the EPAs MCLG. And the other group got iodine.

And the group that got the iodine had enormous reduction in tooth decay. Now, what did they have the mothers do? Nothing. They didn’t change the mother’s behavior. What did they have the parents do? They had the parents bring the child in so the nurse would take a q-tip and go dab, dab. See you in two months. So, they did this six times in a twelve month period. And the ones that used iodine had an enormous drop in the amount of tooth decay.

Well, why aren’t we doing that for all the babies? I mean, iodine is essential for a baby. Not one baby got sick! There’s no reason not to be disinfecting babies especially if the mothers are feeding them sugar. And the message to the mother is stop that! Babies don’t even taste sugar. It’s the mother that taste sugar. Stop that! It’s bad for the baby. Do you want to have a diabetic child? Fine, give them a bunch of sugar.

Will: So, this is a big one for me and worthy of repeating. Are you saying that there are no studies, to your knowledge, that show that topical application of fluoride on the teeth make the tooth enamel harder and protect against tooth decay?

Dr. Kennedy: It doesn’t make it harder. There are studies that show it lowers the tooth decay incidence. Like I was saying. And if you go to the Center for Disease Control Morbidity and Mortality Weekly of 2001, MMWR 2001, and it’s about fluoride going on waxing poetic because these guys, that’s their job, to wax poetic about how good it is to have fluoride in the water. But as you read it, it says the affects of fluoride are predominantly post-eruptive and topical. So, that means the tooth has got to be in the head, you’ve got to be able to see it. So it doesn’t make any difference.

And it goes on to say…well, let me whip that exact quote up so I’m not accused of misrepresenting what the liars say. I’m sorry, it was not 2005, it was 2001. “Recommendations for fluoride to prevent caries” and it says, “Fluoride’s predominant effect is post-eruptive and topical.” Post-eruptive means after the tooth is in head. And topical means like sunblock, you put it on the skin. And it says, “The prevalence of dental caries in a population is not inversely related to the concentration of fluoride in the enamel. And a higher concentration of enamel fluoride is not necessarily more efficacious in preventing caries.”

Now, that’s probably the hardest way you could ever say, “Having enamel with fluoride in it does you no damned good!”

You understand why they said it like that is because their job is to promote fluoride. So, we’ve had these people in depositions before. And one of the questions is, “Would it be safe to say you have a tendency to select the information that you share with communities that are considering fluoridation that represent your point of view?” And they all said, “Well, yeah, that’s right.”

These aren’t scientists, these are propagandists. And further, it says, “Laboratory and epidemiological research suggest that fluoride prevents dental caries predominantly after the eruption of the tooth into the mouth. And its actions are primarily topical for both adults and children.” And that’s that same MMWR.

Who else says that? The Journal of the American Dental Association, John Featherstone wrote an article in 2000. And if the dentist is not familiar with it, ask him if they’ve bothered to read their own journals because it was a 13-page cover article. And he even went on to say that the amount fluoride in saliva… So, say, for instance, you say, “Oh, well, it’s topical. But what we’ve gotta do is we’ve gotta poison the kid with a lot of fluoride so it comes out in their saliva. And then that saliva is going to bathe those teeth in that wonderful xenobiotic. And so that’s going to make the little germs on the teeth choke. Well, John Featherstone pointed out that the amount of fluoride that comes out in saliva is just about the same as comes out in breast milk, which has got several zeros in front of it. So, he said, “The level of fluoride in saliva from drinking fluoridated water is too low to have a measurable impact on the acid dissolution,” which is their scientific way of talking about dental caries. Dental caries is how acid dissolves your teeth.

So, even if you swallow it, the amount coming out of your saliva, because your body has been pretty good about parking it in your bones, is too low to have any impact. So, the only way that you can get levels in your saliva that inhibit the growth of the bacteria that cause tooth decay is to brush your teeth with a high level — about 1,000 to 1,500 parts per million. The fact that it will also lower your I.Q. and a few other things…you’d rather have [people say], “Look at those beautiful white teeth that idiot has!”

Will: So, what do you have to say to the person who, after all this information, they want to use a fluoride oral product? And they fall back on the argument that they aren’t swallowing, so it’s okay.

Dr. Kennedy: Well, the problem is if you have a disease of your heart which is called angina, and your physician says, “Oh, you’ve got a little angina. So, I’m going to give you this little tablet.” And you say, “Oh, a tablet for angina? What should I do with this? Should I take it.” And he says, “Oh, no, no. Just pop it in your mouth and let it dissolve. It’ll absorb from the floor of your mouth. And the nitro tablet will dilate the arteries in your heart and then your angina will go away.”

And if you talk to any of the older people that have had angina, that’s exactly what happens in a matter of a few seconds. So, there is no such thing as a topical application of fluoride. I mentioned earlier the dental office that applies a topical application of fluoride is using levels that are thousands times higher. It’s 50,000 parts per million fluoride in the topical application. But, if we measure the blood level of fluoride, it goes up dramatically, even when they have instructed the child not to swallow. They put a saliva ejector, a spit sucker, in their mouth. They put custom fit trays around a thick gel against the teeth, so it doesn’t dissolve. Doing all of that, the child experiences a dramatic increase in blood levels of fluoride.

So, I gotta tell you a cute story. I was on a bus in Germany coming back from a conference on mercury, another thing I think dentists are foolish about using. And I was sitting next to one of the world’s greatest researchers in mercury, professor Boyd Haley from the University of Kentucky. And Dr. Haley was the guy that helped link mercury to Alzheimer’s disease. And he and I were invited along with twelve experts on mercury to Germany. And so it was a rapid trip to Germany and then we were up at 4 o’clock in the morning on a bus back to Frankfurt and then to head back home.

And I’m sitting in the chair next to Dr. Haley. And he’s sitting there holding his stomach and kind of groaning. And reaching in his pockets and digging out a bottle of Tums. And, I said, “Oh, God! Where’s Allen Funt when you need him?” I’m sitting next to one of the world’s leading Alzheimer’s researchers, and he’s taking little tablets of aluminum!

And, Boyd says, “Oh, I’ve got this terrible heartburn!” And, I said, “Oh, heartburn.” I said, “Did you bring your American toothpaste with you?” And he said, “Yeah, I did. I was using some Colgate.” And I said, “Oh, well that’s 1,500 parts per million fluoride. So, what happens when fluoride hits the stomach acid, hydrochloric acid?” And he said, “Well, that would make hydrogen fluoride.” And I said, “Well, throw some more aluminum on it so you can create some aluminum fluoride so it’ll burn you less.”

And, so he understood. He’s a chemist. He understood exactly what I was saying. This heartburn that he’d been suffering from for many years might have something to do with this early morning departure and the fact that, although he used it topically, he had gotten enough left over on his scum in his mouth that it was causing heartburn.

Two years later, Dr. Haley was speaking at the International Academy of Oral Medicine Toxicology, an organization I strongly recommend that everybody check out in Tucson. And I had just landed my airplane and staggered in to unload my baggage and Boyd saw me and Betty coming across the lobby. And he came powering across the lobby with his hands stuck out.

He says, “Kennedy, I owe you a debt of thanks, and I’ll buy you a cold beer. You’ve saved my life! That information you gave me on the bus on the way to Frankfurt has helped me and my wife Sandy tremendously. We’ve both suffered from acid indigestion, heartburn for years, so much so that we drive to work together. And I’d buy Tums by the case. And they would be sitting on the console in the car.” They have a sports car. “And then we’d both end up using those on the way to work every day! Since I went to a toothpaste that doesn’t have fluoride, I haven’t had one single solitary episode! My wife Sandy, she has had one episode. You know how wives don’t always listen to you? I went to a bunch of Academy of Oral Medicine and Toxicology meetings in the late 80s and I came home thinking that mercury fillings were bad. And then I go to this meeting in Germany, and I come home thinking toothpaste with fluoride is bad. And Sandy said she’d been brushing her teeth with toothpaste for nigh on twenty years. And so she didn’t want to give up her fluoridated toothpaste. So, she would continue to use the fluoridated toothpaste, but she would rinse out. And that had also greatly improved her gastric indigestion. And she hadn’t had an episode at all until the other day when we were driving to work and she made me stop at the 7-11 so she could go in and get some Tums because she had heartburn again. And I said, ‘Honey, I thought you’d recovered from that. And she said, ‘Well, I had. But the phone rang while I was brushing my teeth, and I just spit out instead of rinsing out, and I’ve gotta get some Tums and get that heartburn to go away!”

So, you get not only a cause and effect relationship, you get a single blind reproduction of that effect. And if you don’t think we have a nation full of people with heartburn, look at the number of prescriptions for acid-lowering products. God made acid in your stomach for a reason. A, it kills germs. So, if you eat something that’s got a few germs on it, they’re going to end up taking an acid bath. And, two, it helps you begin to digest your food. So, if you constantly take in stuff that stops that acid production and inhibits the production of acid or neutralizes the acid, you’re going to end up with undigested food moving through your intestines. You’re not going to get the nutrients from it. You’re not going to get the health and nutrition from it.

So, we have a nation full of people who end up using a poison that goes into their mouth, goes into their stomach, causes acid indigestion. And so, they end up neutralizing the acid and not digesting their food, or taking pharmaceutical drugs that do that for them. It’s insane! Do not take two drugs to fix the problem of one. Get rid of the one drug, then you don’t need the other. Think of the money you’ll save!