Harvard Study Finds Fluoride Lowers IQ

By Dr. Mercola

Fluoride is added to 70 percent of U.S. public drinking water supplies to aid in the prevention of cavities.

This benefit is dubious at best, as there is practically no difference in tooth decay rates between fluoridated and non-fluoridated countries, and no difference between states that fluoridate a high versus low percentage of their water.

Yet, while fluoride in drinking water does NOT decrease rates of tooth decay, numerous studies show that this chemical has a wide array of devastating health effects – one of them being lowered IQ.

Yet Another Study Links Fluoride to Lower IQ Levels

A review of brain studies involving the use of fluoride has concluded that one of the adverse effects of fluoride exposure on children is damage to their neurological development.¹ According to the Harvard researchers, children who lived in high-fluoride areas had "significantly lower IQ than those in low fluoride areas," with the authors noting:

"The results support the possibility of an adverse effect of high fluoride exposure on children's neurodevelopment."

This just adds to the growing number of animal and human studies demonstrating the damage fluoride inflicts on your brain, including your pineal gland. The results of one study looking at children's intelligence in two towns – one with fluoridated water and one without – were particularly revealing, with about 28 percent of the children in the low-fluoride area scoring as "bright, normal or higher intelligence" compared to only 8 percent in the high-fluoride area.²

Further, 15 percent of children in the high-fluoride city had signs of mental retardation, compared with only 6 percent in the low-fluoride city. And the study even accounted for other potential variables, such as lead exposure, iodine deficiency or a history of brain disease or head injury. There have been over 23 human studies and 100 animal studies linking fluoride to brain damage. This includes such effects as:³

Some of these effects have been observed even at low levels of exposure, such as 1 part per million (ppm) of fluoride in water. This is below the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) 'safe' drinking water level for fluoride, which is 4 ppm, and right around the levels used in water fluoridation programs, which may range from 0.7-1.2 ppm.

The Fluoride in Your Drinking Water is an Industrial Waste Product

Did you know that the United States is one of only eight countries in the entire developed world that fluoridates more than 50 percent of its water supply? Even China does NOT allow water fluoridation because it's too toxic and causes damage, according to their studies. Instead, the waste product from their phosphate fertilizer industry is shipped to the United States, where we add it to our water supply!

This is a very important point: the fluoride added to your water is NOT even pharmaceutical grade.

It's a toxic industrial waste product, which is also contaminated with lead, arsenic, radionucleotides, aluminum and other industrial contaminants. The story gets even more convoluted, as now declassified files of the Manhattan Project and the Atomic Energy Commission show that the original motivation for promoting fluoride and water fluoridation in the United States was to protect the bomb-, aluminum-, and other fluoride-polluting industries from liability. In the early days some of the sodium fluoride used to fluoridate water supplies in the U.S. came from Alcoa.

A couple of years later, they switched to the even more hazardous waste product hydrofluorosilicic acid from the phosphate fertilizer industry.

While the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) officially claims that "For more than 65 years, water fluoridation has undergone extensive scientific studies and reviews to assess its public health benefits and risks. For many years, panels of experts from different health and scientific fields have provided strong evidence that water fluoridation is safe and effective,"⁴ this claim appears to have the flimsiest of foundations.

According to a 2006 report from the National Research Council,⁵ extensive amounts of research are inconclusive, or still missing and need to be conducted to evaluate the whole-body impact of fluoride …

Not only that, but their scientific review also identified research suggesting a variety of harmful effects, from skeletal fluorosis, bone fractures, and, potentially, even cancer. With that in mind, how can the CDC claim that "extensive research" has concluded water fluoridation is safe for ALL community residents, without differentiation between infants and adults, the sick or the healthy?

How can the CDC possibly claim, as they often do, that water fluoridation is one of the top public health achievements of the last century? Fluoride is a toxic agent that is biologically active in the human body where it accumulates in sensitive tissues over time, wreaks havoc with enzymes and produces a number of serious adverse health effects—including neurological and endocrine dysfunctions. So why is it still being added to so much of the U.S. water supply?

Healthy Food – Not Fluoride – Essential for Healthy Teeth

Fluoride's predominant action is on the surface of your tooth (although even this is now questionable) and not from inside the body – so the idea that many Americans are still being forced to swallow it for their teeth defies all common reason. Good oral health and strong, healthy teeth are NOT the result of drinking fluoridated water and brushing your teeth with fluoridated toothpaste. Rather it's virtually all about your diet.

Dr. Weston A. Price, who was one of the major nutritional pioneers of all time, completed some of the most extensive research on this topic back in the early 1900s and documented his findings in his classic book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. He found native tribes who were eating their traditional diet had nearly perfect teeth, and were almost 100 percent free of tooth decay -- and they did not have toothbrushes, floss, toothpaste, or root canals and fillings.

But when these tribal populations were introduced to sugar and white flour, guess what happened … their health, and their perfect teeth, rapidly deteriorated, just like the kids in El Salvador. By avoiding sugars and processed foods, you prevent the proliferation of the bacteria that cause decay in the first place.

Most people whose diet includes very little sugar and few processed foods have very low rates of tooth decay. So the simple act of limiting, or eliminating sugar, and avoiding processed foods -- along with regular cleanings with your natural mercury-free dentist -- will ensure that your teeth and gums stay healthy and cavity-free naturally. 

Infants and Children Among Those Most at Risk

Breast milk contains very little, almost no, fluoride, and this is by design. Remember, fluoride is a neurodevelopmental toxin that can damage a baby's brain. As Dr. Paul Connett, co-author of the book, The Case Against Fluoride, explained:

"In the view of many critics of fluoridation, including Arvid Carlsson, Nobel laureate in medicine/physiology, it is reckless to expose infants to levels of fluoride orders of magnitude higher than that found in breast milk.

In the U.S., infants who are fed formula reconstituted with fluoridated tap water receive the highest levels of fluoride (per kilogram bodyweight) in the human population. Specifically, infants who are fed formula made with fluoridated water at the current level of 1 part-per-million (1 ppm = 1 mg/liter) fluoride will receive a dose up to 250 times more than the breastfed infant.

Even with the proposal by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to lower fluoride to 0.7 ppm in fluoridation schemes, bottle-fed infants will still receive up to 175 times more fluoride than the breastfed infant.

… Even though health agencies in the U.S. and other fluoridating countries have recognized that children are being grossly over-exposed to fluoride (41 percent of American children aged 12-15 now have some form of dental fluorosis), they are unwilling to concede that fluoride may be impacting the brain. Their approach has been either to ignore these studies completely or to challenge the relevance and the methodology of the fluoride-brain studies. They have thus far failed to conduct any IQ studies of their own."

What You Can Do TODAY!

The Fluoride Action Network⁶ has a game plan to END water fluoridation in both Canada and the United States. Our fluoride initiative will primarily focus on Canada since 60 percent of Canada is already non-fluoridated. If we can get Calgary and the rest of Canada to stop fluoridating their water, we believe the U.S. will be forced to follow.

Please, join the anti-fluoride movement in Canada and United States by contacting the representative for your area below.

Contact Information for Canadian Communities:

1. If you live in Ontario, Canada, please join the ongoing effort by contacting Diane Sprules at [email protected].
2. The point-of-contact for Toronto, Canada is Aliss Terpstra. You may email her at [email protected].

Contact Information for American Communities:

We're also going to address three U.S. communities: New York City, Austin, and San Diego:

In addition, you can:

• Make a tax-deductible donation to the Fluoride Action Network, to help them fight for your rights to fluoride-free food and water.
• Check out FAN's Action Page, as they are working on multiple fronts to rid our food and water supplies of fluoride.
• For timely updates, join the Fluoride Action Network Facebook page.

Further, if you are capable of being an advocate of safe drinking water and would like to assist in identifying a champion for due diligence in your community, contact us for approaches and further information.