​​If you don’t want to have Fluoride as part of your dental treatment then simply tell your dentist.

Every dental practice will have alternatives to fluoride readily stocked (Read more here)

Your dentist might be bemused by your decision. But more and more people are bringing this up so your dentist should be less surprised than they would have been a few years ago.

They will almost certainly ask you why you want to avoid fluoride.

Why Your Dentist Wants You to Have Fluoride

The thing is that your dentist has been trained to think fluoride is a great health product. 

They really do want what’s best for you.

But their training is part of a heavily marketed sixty-year-old mindset where a rampant chemicals industry told us that “all chemicals are great” and there wouldn’t be any downsides.

(Yes. Some chemicals might have have done good. But not all of them).

You chemist most likely wasn’t educated on the fact that Fluoride is a highly toxic chemical.

So How Toxic is Fluoride?

Well that depends on the exact type of fluoride , but you probably wouldn’t want to feed any of them to your family pet.

Some studies have suggested that fluoride is a human developmental neurotoxicant that reduces intelligence in children (Note 1)

Consider that chemicals like DDT and others were in circulation for decades, with hearty assurances from men in lab coats that they weren’t harmful.

But DDT was withdrawn after observation by concerned,  thoughtful healthcare experts led to a rethink. 

Similar concerns surround fluoride.

On the one hand you have an industry making a lot of money.

On the other you have concerned professionals with little to gain but ridicule and rejection.

Just because a chemical is in widespread use doesn’t make it OK.

So have a simple answer ready for them.

Four things to tell your dentist why you don’t want any fluoride in your fillings or other dental treatments.

1) You could tell them it’s a highly toxic chemical that hardly any studies have been carried out on and that you’d rather err on the side of caution…

Yes you understand it does strengthen teeth etc. But what does it do to the rest of your body?

2) Tell them you prefer the precautionary principle. Who knows about the ins-and-outs but thanks so much you’d rather not have the chemical in your body if there are alternatives (There are).

3) And as your dentist will know, as long as you brush your teeth you don’t need fluoride, either in your toothpaste or in your dental treatment products

If your dentist disagrees with this then they’re either misinformed, under-educated or they’re not telling you the truth. So perhaps it’s time to find another dentist…

4) Or you could get more interesting and left-field your dentist with “I’m worried that fluoride interferes with my creativity”.

Why do some Public Health officials want you to have fluoride?

It’s not because they’re evil.

Like your fluoride-addicted dentist, they really do want what is best.

The fact is that Fluoride is added to tap water simply to protect the teeth of those unfortunate kids whose parents, for whatever reason, don’t look after them properly.

Public health officials will have seen these results for themselves. And they’re devastating.

So that’s why they care.

Tooth decay is the biggest reason in the UK for hospitalisation for children aged five to nine.

(And before we all start feeling smug and blamey: it’s not just ‘poor people’. Some rich kids also get neglected and hospitalised with terrible tooth decay) .

Don Draper’s Part in all this

Adding fluoride to toothpaste was as much an exercise in marketing toothpaste as in improving dental health.

The advertising industry is not a public-minded charity. They are paid by businesses to talk about things that will make them money.

Just like adding lead to petrol did indeed make engines run smoother,…

Yes: fluoride is good for teeth

But if you brush your teeth regularly, fluoride is not necessary.

Like adding lead to petrol,  adding fluoride to toothpaste wasn’t necessarily such a great idea in other ways…

Now, of course, “lead free petrol” is advertised as a marketing “benefit“.

But this started with the work of unpaid public spirited campaigners who – despite ridicule – publicised the health risks of spraying lead out of car exhausts… into children’s brains…

No doubt we can expect the major toothpaste manufacturers to start boasting about their fluoride-free alternatives.

And so it goes…

Notes

Note 1 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32382957/ 

Further reading

Avoiding Fluoride Dental Materials – non-fluoride dental products

Does Fluoride Interfere with Creativity

More Information

Fluoride in Drinking Water – Good idea?
How to remove fluoride from your UK tap water
Full article on Fluoride and water
Is your area fluoridated (UK)