You'll Be Shocked at the Connection Between Fluoride and IQ!

Scott: Doctor, you talked about infants a little while ago.  Can you talk about the exposure they have to fluoride?

Prof. Paul Connett: Well the problem with the infants is their small body weight.  So the effective dose, or what we call dosage.  Dose is milligrams per day... the quantity you take in.  But in terms of what could cause harm, the most important figure is milligrams per kilogram body weight.  You divide the dose by the body weight.  And then, when you get to the dosage, which is what will harm you, and this is like the effective concentration anywhere in the body.  For babies, it's huge.  I've already said that a bottle fed baby is getting 200 times more fluoride than a breastfed baby.  But now this fluoride that it gets is confronted with a very small body weight.  So we're very concerned about babies and we know that it's causing harm because of the dental fluorosis rates.  But they are still denying that it's doing any other harm to their bones or brains.  And as I say, we've got to offset that now with 33 studies which shows the lowering of IQ with fairly modest levels.

The Harvard, has just done a review of this, two scientists at Harvard, Anna Choi, who's Chinese and Philippe Grandjean from the Harvard School of Public Health, did a meta analysis.  They looked at 27 of these studies.  26 of them showed a lowering of IQ between the high fluoride exposure and the low fluoride.  That's remarkably consistent.  And in their meta analysis, the reduction in IQ was about half of one standard deviation.  Which is highly significant.  It amounts to about 7 IQ points.  So in these villages, between the high and the low was a drop of 7 IQ points.  Now, you've got to remember that those levels are higher than we have, but not that much.  Nine of those studies, the high village was less than three parts per million, and one of the studies has a threshold of one point 9 parts per million.  The most recent study looked at children drinking water at between point three parts per million and three parts per million.  So this overlaps our range.  And what they, they didn't do this crude business of comparing a high village with a low village.  What they did was to measure the fluoride in the children's urine and their IQ.  See, they've got two, the level of the fluoride in the urine, and their IQ.  And they've got a number of children in each categories.  And they found a highly significant reduction in IQ correlating with the level of fluoride in the urine.  So basically you've got a measure of individual exposure.  

Now we have studies, we don't have enough studies of fluoride in the urine amongst American children, but there's a study from England.  And I think it was about 5 or 6 percent of the urine levels in England were above 3 parts per million.  So we have children in western societies, who's level of fluoride in their urine is corresponding to the levels of fluoride in the Chinese study, which showed a lowering of IQ.  So I don't think they can get away with maintaining that 'oh those are just high levels, very high levels.'  Which is not true.

You know I was really surprised, and disgusted in fact that the Pew Charitable Trusts has got involved in this promotion of fluoridation.  Obviously I don't think they did their homework.  But when they looked at the Choi study, they said 'oh, the levels were very high, 11 point five parts per million.'  Well talk about cherry picking the data.  Of the 27 studies, I think only two were above 8 parts per million.  As already mentioned, nine were below 3 parts per million.  So to quote this 11 point 5 parts per million as if it was the average... was ridiculous... I mean that's undergraduate stuff.  I'd expect an undergraduate to try to get away with that in a term paper, but not the Pew Charitable Trust, who pride themselves on the independent research.  This is pathetic.

They also confused the point 4-5 drop of a standard deviation.  It was standard median difference, or SMD, which is a statistical measure.  They confused that with the number of IQ points.  So they were talking about the drop of point 4-5 IQ points, instead of what it amounted to which was a drop of 7 IQ points.  But again, I think you get an inkling of politics trumping science.  And again, why?  Is it through ignorance, is it through zealotry?  Are they so convinced themselves that this is a good idea that they want everything to fall neatly into place and that if a study finds harm than it's a junk study?  And if a scientist argues against it, writes a book against it then he's a junk scientist.  It's working backwards.  For some reason there are people out there in health agencies who are more determined to protect this practice than they are to protect the health of the American people and I find that rather frightening.