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Fluoride, added to the water supply of many cities and counties and sold by WalMart in its nursery water, has a tendency to accumulate not only in developing teeth causing discoloration, and in bones making them brittle. The mineral is associated with cancer and it also accumulates in the pineal gland, an important hormone control center, where it wreaks considerable havoc. Paul Connett of Fluoride Action Network comments on Jennifer Luke’s research which was part of her PhD thesis and had just been published in Caries Research under the title: Fluoride Deposition in the Aged Human Pineal Gland.

Fluoride is a poison, yet we add it to our water and toothpaste and even call it a supplement, although it has no nutritional value. Its medicinal value – the prevention of tooth decay – is the official explanation for adding the toxic mineral to the water supply. But that value is far outweighed by its toxic side effects – amply documented by Paul Connett in his Statement of Concern.

Recent European Union legislation on food supplements lists fluoride as an essential element to offer for supplementation. This is somewhat ironic when contrasted with the European legislators’ feigned concern over the putative toxicity of vitamins and their efforts to limit dosages of these vital nutrients in order to “protect public health”.

We also use fluoride in many household items, such as non-stick frying pans, high-tech water repellent fabrics and others. Recently, at least some timid attempts to start assessing the disease burden caused by fluoride are under way. The Journal of Water Health carries an article on this research. Meanwhile in the US, the FDA has decided that fluoride should be allowed in bottled water, perhaps in deference to WalMart’s offerings.

The use of fluoride for “health” reasons is one of the great insanities of our times. Could it be just by chance that the Germans and Russians both used fluoride to make prisoners stupid and docile or that the US government faced legal action over the toxic effects in the environment of this nuclear waste by-product?

Perhaps the push for ‘enriching’ our water and our foods with fluoride has some ulterior motive that has little to do with health. Be that as it may, the campaign for fluoridation is stil in full swing and health authorities are pushing the poison as if their monthly paychecks depended on it.

Jennifer Luke’s PhD thesis on fluoride and its accumulation in the pineal gland – Paul Connett says that research might just be the scientific straw that breaks the camel’s back:

Fluoride & the Pineal Gland: Study Published in Caries Research

The wheels of science grind very slowly. Finally, the first half of the work that was the subject of Jennifer Luke’s Ph.D. thesis; presentation in Bellingham, Washington (ISFR conference) in 1998 and a videotaped interview I had with her (see www.fluoridealert.org/videos.htm), has been published in Caries Research.

In my view this work is of enormous importance and could be (or should be) the scientific straw that breaks the camel’s back of fluoridation.

When Luke found out that the pineal gland – a little gland in the center of the brain, responsible for a very large range of regulating activities (it produces serotonin and melatonin) – was also a calcifying tissue, like the teeth and the bones, she hypothesized it would concentrate fluoride to very high levels. The gland is not protected by the blood brain barrier and has a very high perfusion rate of blood, second only to the kidney.

Luke had 11 cadavers analyzed in the UK. As she predicted she found astronomically high levels of fluoride in the calcium hydroxy apatite crystals produced by the gland. The average was 9000 ppm and went as high as 21,000 in one case. These levels are at, or higher, than fluoride levels in the bones of people suffering from skeletal fluorosis. It is these findings which have just been published.

It is the ramifications of these findings which have yet to be published. In the second half of her work she treated animals (Mongolian gerbils) with fluoride at a crack pineal gland research unit at the University of Surrey, UK (so there is no question about the quality of this work). She found that melatonin production (as measured by the concentration of a melatonin metabolite in the urine) was lower in the animals treated with high fluoride levels compared with those treated with low levels.

Luke hypothesizes that one of the four enzymes needed to convert the amino acid tryptophan (from the diet) into melatonin is being inhibited by fluoride. It could be one of the two enzymes which convert tryptophan to serotonin or one of the two which convert serotonin to melatonin.

Significance? Huge. Melatonin is reponsible for regulating all kinds of activities and there is a vast amount of work investigating its possible roles in aging, cancer and many other life processes. The one activity that Luke is particularly interested in is the onset of puberty. The highest levels of melatonin ( produced only at night) is generated in young children. It is thought that it is the fall of these melatonin levels which acts like a biological clock and triggers the onset of puberty. In her gerbil study she found that the high fluoride treated animals were reaching puberty earlier than the low fluoride ones.

We know from recent studies – and considerable press coverage – that young girls are reaching puberty earlier and earlier in the US. Luke is not saying that fluoride (or fluoridation) is the cause but her work waves a very worrying red flag. Fluoride’s role in earlier puberty needs more thorough investigation. Of an interesting historical note, in the Newburgh versus Kingston fluoridation trial (1945-1955), it was found that the girls in fluoridated Newburgh were reaching menstruation, on average, five months earlier than the girls in unfluoridated Kingston, but the result was not thought to be significant at the time (Schlessinger et al, 1956).

When one considers the seriousness of a possible interference by fluoride on a growing child’s pineal gland (and for that matter, elderly pineal glands) it underlines the recklessness of fluoridation. The precautionary principle would say, as would basic common sense, that you don’t take these kind of risks with our children for a benefit which, at best, amounts to 0.6 tooth surfaces out of 128 tooth surfaces in a child’s mouth (Brunelle and Carlos, 1990, Table 6).

I have a copy of Luke’s Ph.D. thesis and would be willing to share it with those who have a serious scientific interest in this issue. The other references cited above can be found in my Statement of Concern which is published on the FAN webpage: http://www.fluoridealert.org/fluoride-statement.htm

Paul Connett

Related:

Cure Tooth Decay!

Heal And Prevent Cavities With Nutrition

Please check out this link and sign the petition asking Walmart to stop selling fluoride “Nursery Water” for infants.

Fluoride: Friend or Foe?

by David De Santo

GERMANS & RUSSIANS USED FLUORIDE TO MAKE PRISONERS ‘STUPID & DOCILE

The Fluoride Deception: How a Nuclear Waste Byproduct Made Its Way Into the Nation’s Drinking Water

Toxic Teflon: Compounds from Household Products Found in Human Blood

DuPont and other companies use those synthetic compounds to make an extraordinarily wide range of products, including nonstick cookware (e.g, Teflon), grease-resistant food packaging (e.g., microwave popcorn and pizza boxes), stain-resistant fabrics and carpets (e.g., Stainmaster), shampoos, conditioners, cleaning products, electronic components, paints, firefighting foams, and a host of other artifacts of modern life. But like many “better things” produced by industrial chemistry, these products can have disastrous side effects.

Fluoridation of drinking water – the UK Soil Association’s position

h. We consider that the practice of adding fluoride to drinking water is prophylactic treatment and is therefore in opposition to organic principles. As a result the Soil Association is opposed to the artificial fluoridation of water by water companies and also the legislation allowing this practice. We support the campaign by the National Pure Water Association for water companies to have the right not to fluoridate their water.

Fluoridation Doing More Harm Than Good, Studies Show

Pizzo and colleagues reviewed English-language fluoridation studies published from January 2001 to June 2006 and write, “Several epidemiological studies conducted in fluoridated and non-fluoridated communities suggest that [fluoridation] may be unnecessary for caries prevention.” They also report that fluoride-damaged teeth spiked upwards to 51% from the 10-12% found over 60 years ago in ‘optimally’ fluoridated communities.

‘Second Thoughts about Fluoride,’ Reports Scientific American

After 3 years of scrutinizing hundreds of studies, a National Research Council (NRC) committee “concluded that fluoride can subtly alter endocrine function, especially in the thyroid — the gland that produces hormones regulating growth and metabolism,” reports Fagin.

Fagin quotes John Doull, professor emeritus of pharmacology and toxicology at the University of Kansas Medical Center, who chaired the NRC committee thusly, “The thyroid changes do worry me.”

From, Dr. Mercola

Developed by Dietrich Klinghardt, MD, PhD., autonomic resonance testing (ART) is a comprehensive diagnostic system that uses changes in muscle tone as a primary indicator. The journal Chiropractic & Osteopathy published a review on the reliability and validity of manual muscle testing in 2007. (Scott C Cuthbert and George J Goodheart Jr, Chiropractic & Osteopathy 2007,15:4 doi:10.1186/1746-1340-15-4).

Dr. Klinghardt is also a world leader in the areas of psychoneurobiology, environmental toxicity, chronic infection, and family systems influences, and how these lead to chronic illness.

Here Dr. Klinghardt shares his more than 25-years of experience synthesizing traditional and alternative medicine, and the many benefits of ART.

Get reports and interviews like this by signing up for the free newsletter at dgswilson.com-mercola subscribe

“EPA admitted to approving the pesticide illegally…”

By Rick Wills
www.pittsburgh live.com

A federal judge banned the sale of a Bayer CropScience pesticide that environmental groups and commercial beekeepers say is potentially toxic to the nation’s threatened honeybee population.

Both Bayer CropScience, a North Carolina subsidiary of Bayer AG, and the Environmental Protection Agency have 60 days to appeal the decision of Manhattan U.S. District Judge Denise Cote.

The ban would make the sale of spirotetramat, known by the trade names Movento and Ultor, illegal in the United States after Jan. 15.

Cote’s decision does not explicitly address the inconclusive impact the pesticide might have on honeybees. Instead, she faulted the EPA for ignoring steps required in any pesticide approval process, including failing to take public comment and failing to publish Bayer’s application and the agency’s approval in the Federal Register.

“The EPA utterly failed to comply with these procedural requirements and has offered no explanation whatsoever for these shortcomings,” Cote wrote.

Bayer CropScience said it is disappointed with the court’s decision, which it said is based on the EPA’s procedural error. The company is “considering its options” but has not filed an appeal, spokesman Jack Boyne said.

“The ruling has nothing to do with the characteristics of spirotetramat itself, and raises no substantive concerns regarding the product,” Boyne said. “Spirotetramat has been extensively tested in laboratory and field studies and has shown excellent performance, with regard to bee safety.”

The EPA has not filed an appeal, said agency spokeswoman Enesta Jones. “We are reviewing the decision,” she said, without elaboration.

The decision comes three years after scientists identified Colony Collapse Disorder, a mysterious die-off that each winter has killed at least half the bees kept by the nation’s large commercial beekeepers. Its cause largely has eluded researchers.

“This decision pulls a potentially dangerous insecticide from the market so that it can be evaluated. There are lower-risk alternatives on the market,” said Aaron Colangelo, an attorney for the New York-based Natural Resources Defense Council, which sued the EPA along with the Xerces Society, a Portland, Ore. wildlife conservation group.

It is unusual for a federal judge to issue such an order, said Colangelo, who has litigated pesticide cases for more than a decade. “EPA admitted to approving the pesticide illegally, but argued that its violations of the law should have no consequences.”

The EPA approved spirotetramat in 2008 for use on hundreds of crops, including apples, pears, peaches, oranges, tomatoes, grapes, strawberries, almonds and spinach.

Pennsylvania’s largest beekeeper, Dave Hackenberg of Lewisburg in Union County, welcomed Cote’s decision. Some of his bee colonies were used in an incomplete Bayer study of spirotetramat done last year in Florida.

“This is just round one. We figure Bayer will go back to court. Somebody also needs to take a look at the rest of the chemicals being used,” said Hackenberg, who, like many beekeepers, said he believes that new pesticides are the primary cause of the bee loss.

For the past three winters, Hackenberg lost at least half of his bees, which he rents to everyone from blueberry growers in Maine to large almond-growing establishments in California to aid in pollination.

This year will be worse than last year, he predicted.

“Fifty percent of my bees have died since summer. That’s bad for this early. Losses started in October, and there are still two months to go,” he said.

Researchers like Maryann Frazier of Penn State University say experiments show pesticides in general have an impact on honeybees, but more work needs to be done.

“We are still very concerned that pesticides are a big part of the problem with honeybees,” she said.

Colony Collapse Disorder has been associated with viruses, mites and poor bee treatment.

“There is a combination of things at work here, which is what makes the research slower and more complicated,” Frazier said.

According to the Department of Agriculture, bees pollinate $15 billion worth of crops grown in the United States.

Dr. Mercola and mercola.com

(The links on this page will lead to a free subscription page. Don’r worry about it, it’s legit, I signed up and that’s how I get all this information from the Doc.)

The saturated fat found mainly in meat and dairy products has been regularly vilified by physicians and the media, but a new analysis of published studies finds no clear link between people’s intake of saturated fat and their risk of developing heart disease.

In the new analysis, which combined the results of 21 previous studies, researchers found no clear evidence that higher saturated fat intakes led to higher risks of heart disease or stroke.

A number of studies have linked the so-called Western diet to greater heart disease risks; that diet pattern is defined as one high in red meats and saturated fats — but it is also high in sweets and other refined carbohydrates like white bread.

Sources:

*Reuters February 4, 2010

*American Journal of Clinical Nutrition January 13, 2010 [Epub ahead of print]

The demonization of saturated fat began in 1953 with Dr. Ancel Keys’ publication of a paper comparing fat intake and heart disease mortality, and the misguided ousting of saturated fat has continued ever since.

The idea that saturated fat is bad for your heart became so ingrained in the medical and health community, anyone daring enough to question this dogma was automatically viewed as a quack, regardless of the evidence presented.

Instead, trans fats became all the rage and have since saturated the market.

But times are a-changing, and in many ways for the better.

Along with a new interest in reviewing the sanity of vaccinating against every microscopic foe under the sun, medical scientists have finally begun to take a hard look at the link between saturated fats and heart disease – only to find that there is none.

Additionally, by now many have realized that it’s the trans fat found in margarine, vegetable shortening, and partially hydrogenated vegetable oils that is the true villain, causing far more significant health problems than saturated fat ever could.

Yet Another Study Finds No Link Between Saturated Fat and Heart Disease

Over the years, researchers have repeatedly failed to find the link between saturated fat and heart disease that Dr. Keys initially thought he had discovered, and this latest study is no exception.

When they pooled data from 21 studies that included nearly 348,000 adults, and surveyed their dietary habits and health events for anywhere from five to 23 years, they found no no difference in the risks of heart disease and stroke between people with the lowest and highest intakes of saturated fat.

Most likely, the studies that have linked the so-called “Western diet” to an increased heart disease risk simply confirm that sugar and refined carbohydrates are harmful to your heart health. Because although the Western diet is high in red and processed meats and saturated fats, it’s also alarmingly high in sugar and refined carbs like bread and pasta.

What I found most encouraging in this article was Dr. Eckel’s statement that “the thinking on diet and heart health is moving away from a focus on single nutrients and toward ‘dietary patterns’.”

This is precisely the message that needs to get out. You simply cannot optimize your health while staring at individual ingredients or nutrients in your diet.

Whole foods – real food that has been minimally processed and manipulated – contain so many symbiotic micronutrients that work together to produce the end result. The moment you start taking these ingredients apart, you lose the overall nutritional value, and you change how the nutrients operate inside your body.

Take the Mediterranean diet, for example. It consists mainly of whole, fresh foods like fruits and vegetables, along with fish, whole grains and unsaturated fats like virgin olive oil.

This type of diet has repeatedly been found to help lower your risk of heart disease and stroke. And although it’s low in saturated fats, perhaps the most significant thing about the Mediterranean style diet is the absence of processed foods, which are loaded with sugars and dangerous trans fats.

So, essentially, a healthy diet is quite simply a natural diet of REAL foods. And that’s the type of “eating pattern” you’ll want to strive for, if you want to be optimally healthy.

Confusing the Facts About Saturated Fats

Part of the scientific confusion about saturated fats relates to the fact that your body is capable of synthesizing the saturated fats it needs from carbohydrates, and these saturated fats are principally the same ones present in dietary fats of animal origin.

However, and this is the key, not all saturated fatty acids are created equal.

There are subtle differences that have profound health implications, and if you avoid eating all saturated fats you will suffer serious health consequences. There are in fact more than a dozen different types of saturated fat, but you predominantly consume only three: stearic acid, palmitic acid and lauric acid.

It’s already been well established that stearic acid (found in cocoa and animal fat) has no effect on your cholesterol levels at all, and actually gets converted in your liver into the monounsaturated fat called oleic acid.

The other two, palmitic and lauric acid, do raise total cholesterol. However, since they raise “good” cholesterol as much or more than “bad” cholesterol, you’re still actually lowering your risk of heart disease.

Yes, You DO Need Saturated Fat!

Foods containing saturated fats include:

• Meat
• Dairy products
• Some oils
• Tropical plants such as coconut and palm trees

These (saturated) fats from animal and vegetable sources provide a concentrated source of energy in your diet, and they provide the building blocks for cell membranes and a variety of hormones and hormone-like substances.

When you eat fats as part of your meal, they slow down absorption so that you can go longer without feeling hungry. In addition, they act as carriers for important fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E and K.

Dietary fats are also needed for the conversion of carotene to vitamin A, for mineral absorption, and for a host of other biological processes.

Saturated fats are also:

• The preferred fuel for your heart, and also used as a source of fuel during energy expenditure
• Useful antiviral agents (caprylic acid)
• Effective as an anticaries, antiplaque and anti fungal agents (lauric acid)
• Useful to actually lower cholesterol levels (palmitic and stearic acids)
• Modulators of genetic regulation and prevent cancer (butyric acid)

The Link Between TRANS FAT and Heart Disease

Now, it is still clear that there is some association between fat and heart disease. The problem lies in the fact that most studies make no effort to differentiate between saturated fat and trans fat. Additionally, the other primary processed food that typically is associated with trans fat is sugar, specifically fructose.

What Ancel Keys, and other researchers have failed to do in their multivariate analysis is control for each of these two variables. If researchers were to more carefully evaluate the risks of heart disease by measuring the levels of fructose, trans and saturated fat, they would most likely find the true answer.

You see, fructose and trans fat known to increase your LDL levels, or “bad” cholesterol, while lowering your levels of HDL, known as “good” cholesterol, which, of course is the complete opposite of what you need in order to maintain good heart health. It can also cause major clogging of arteries, type 2 diabetes and other serious health problems.

Your body needs some amount of saturated fat to stay healthy. It is virtually impossible to achieve a nutritionally adequate diet that has no saturated fat. What you don’t need, however, are trans fats and fructose in excess of 15 grams per day. Since the average adolescent is now consuming 75 grams of fructose per day, one can begin to understand why we have an obesity and heart disease epidemic.

Contradictory Results SUPPORT Nutritional Typing

Studies also clearly show that despite great compliance to low saturated fat diets, there is a wide difference in biological responses. The question is, what does this mean? Does it mean the studies are flawed? And if so, which ones?

Interestingly enough, perhaps they’re all “right,” because these contradictory results actually support nutritional typing, which predicts that one-third of people will do very well on low saturated fat diets (which supports the studies showing that they work), but another one-third of people need high saturated fat diets to stay healthy.

Healthy Fat Tips to Live By

Remember, you do need a certain amount of healthy fat, while at the same time you’ll want to avoid the unhealthy varieties.

The easiest way to accomplish this is to simply eliminate processed foods, which are high in all things detrimental to your health: sugar, carbs, and dangerous types of fats.

After that, these tips can help ensure you’re eating the right fats for your health:

• Use organic butter (preferably made from raw milk) instead of margarines and vegetable oil spreads. Butter is a healthy whole food that has received an unwarranted bad rap.
• Use coconut oil for cooking. It is far superior to any other cooking oil and is loaded with health benefits. (Remember that olive oil should be used COLD, drizzled over salad or fish, for example, not to cook with.)
• Following my nutrition plan will automatically reduce your modified fat intake, as it will teach you to focus on healthy whole foods instead of processed junk food.
• To round out your healthy fat intake, be sure to eat raw fats, such as those from avocados, raw dairy products, and olive oil, and also take a high-quality source of animal-based omega-3 fat, such as krill oil.

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