After acquiring Propaganda which was authored by Bernays, reading on the PR campaigns of Bernays, and coming to the understanding that Bernays was involved in a campaign with the American Dental Association (ADA) to promote the use of fluoride in the drinking water, I wanted to dig a bit deeper and see how this lined up with toothpaste and the public perception on what fluoride was at that time. I know this is a rather well known conspiracy trope, but hell, sounded like a good way to spend a night personally. Here's what I found:
First lets talk Fluoride. The ways we most commonly interact with Fluoride are in the forms Stannous Fluoride (SnF2), Hexafluorosilicic Acid ( (H3O)2SiF6 ), and Sodium Fluoride (NaF).
Stannous Fluoride was used in the first toothpaste approved by the ADA, sold as Fluoristan in 1954, changing it's name to Crest with Fluoistan in 1955, sold by Procter & Gamble. This particular compound is still in use today, and has the following International Chemical Safety Card (ICSC). The card denotes that this compound is considered poison, and harmful - keep away from food stuffs. The threshold limit value (TLV; Level to which it is believed a worker can be exposed day after day for a working lifetime without adverse effects) is 2.5mg/m3 as a time-weighted average (TWA; Concentration for up to a 10-hour workday during a 40-hour workweek.) Note that this will only apply towards the Fluoride in the compound.
Hexafluorosilicic Acid is currently the most used form of Fluoride for use in drinking water. Curiously, on the wiki page for Water Fluoridation, the footnote corroborating this fact leads to a dead page on the CDC website, I needed to go to the EPA website to have an "official" source. It's main use is as a precursor for compounds that are directly used in converting Aluminum ore into Aluminum metal. It is also used to refine Lead, and in rust removing products. It has this ICSC which denotes that this compound is considered corrosive. Once again, the TLV is 2.5mg/m3.
Sodium Fluoride was the first form of Fluoride used in drinking water which is still used today, it is the most prevalent form of Fluoride in toothpastes, and is used in pesticides. Here is it's ICSC, telling us that this compound is considered poison, and harmful - keep away from food stuffs. And yet again, the TLV is 2.5mg/m3
WHEW, that is a huge wall of text. Now that we know how we use what compounds, let us look at how we intake those compounds. Note that the adequate intake (AI) of Fluoride varies between age, sex, and geolocation. In Europe, it's 0.6mg/day to 3.4mg/day, with an upper limit of 7.0mg/day. In the United States, it's 0.7mg/day to 4.0mg/day, with an upper limit of 10.0mg/day.
Foods - Black tea can get as high as 4.54mg/serving. I suspect this upper limit is relatively rare, as the average serving listed is .881mg/8oz. Raisins have 0.234mg/100g, and one of those little boxes of raisins isn't even 50g, but 43g, giving a serving size of 0.101mg/serving. Table wine at 750ml/bottle contains 1.150mg. The others are notable, but do not raise as much alarm due to content lower than those examples provided.
Toothpaste - Go read your toothpaste tube, it tells you not to ingest it. Don't ingest this obviously, but what if you did? Remember those links in the Sodium Fluoride paragraph? They list the % of Fluoride in comparison to the entire tubes contents.
The particular example in this paragraph states .24% Sodium Fluoride, though what we're after is the Fluoride Ion, which is listed as .14%. Lets transfer that to PPM to make math easy, 1400ppm, Divide by 1,000,000 because ppm, multiply by the weight of the product, 6oz = 170.10g, gives us .238g per 6oz of product. Now you need to assume average usage which is .25g, Divide that into the weight to get the average number of uses, 680.40, then divide that into 238mg(.238g) to get Fluoride amount used per brushing, .35mg.
Now, most people put way too much on so that number is actually higher, however I'm doing this according to the directions provided. One can easily see that if a flavor of toothpaste, say fruit or candy flavored, can provide children an urge to swallow it, even 1g of toothpaste, is higher than the average of most foods. Again, DO NOT INGEST!!
Fluoridated Water - United States regulations give us an upper limit of 0.7mg/L for both tap water and bottled water. Given a regular bottle of water, 500ml, 2 bottles gets you 0.7mg, or just under a fifth of United States recommendation of adequate intake. The upper limit was 1.2mg/L for tap water prior to 2011, or 1/3 of daily adequate intake per liter. HO. LY. SHIT.
So, uh, that pretty much covers the major interactions we have with Fluoride! If I eat a few handfuls of raisins (150g, .351mg F- ), drink my 8 glasses of water that is recommended (5.6mg F- ), and accidentally swallow my officially pea-sized amount of toothpaste (.35mg F- ), we end up with 6.31mg F- just under the upper limit designated by Europe! Good thing I calculated this by how much the United States uses (upper limit 10mg), because obviously people who live in the United States need more! 'MURICA!
I don't think we need to debate the horrible effects of fluoride, but hey, I would be lazy if I didn't at least list em! SO I'm gonna be lazy. There is over 500 pages here, that I'm not going through tonight, if you are interested. Suffice to say that yes, what you probably think is more than likely true. If you desire more condensed but accessible material, there's this one and this one. Do know that Fluoride does provide an essential function, the formation of Fluorapatite which helps to guard against tooth decay and Streptococcus mutans, which are bacterium that are responsible for the formation of cavities.
Many of us are familiar with the effects of excessive fluoride, which is commonly discussed in the conspiracy world.
So, Bernays. This fucking guy. The Fluoride Deception details his involvement fairly well, and I recommend it to anyone who is interested in one potential theory about how and why all this came to be. There is also this great article that covers his involvement in much more detail than I can, while putting it in context of the fluoridation movement as a whole.
reposted from r/conspiracyundone
