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