The Fluoride Deception
by Christopher Bryson
with a foreword by Dr. Theo Colborn
Seven Stories Press, May 2004
May 2006: A paperback edition of the book has been released! The new edition features an introduction discussig the recent developments on fluoride and bone cancer. To order a copy, click here
Video Interview: To watch FAN’s video interview with the author, click here.
“Bryson marshals an impressive amount of research to demonstrate fluoride’s harmfulness, the ties between leading fluoride researchers and the corporations who funded and benefi ted from their research, and what he says is the duplicity with which fluoridation was sold to the people. The result is a compelling challenge to the reigning dental orthodoxy, which should provoke renewed scientific scrutiny and public debate.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
“The arguments have raged for more than forty years, and in The Fluoride Deception, Christopher Bryson raises the stakes by reporting a great deal of relevant and often alarming research, and by telling a series of human stories… [A] thought-provoking and worthwhile book.”
NATURE, “A Chemical Conspiracy?” March 17, 2005
“‘The Fluoride Deception’ reads like a whodunit. There are conspiracies, cover-ups, human casualties, and broken careers. The prime suspects in this toxic thriller are compounds of fluoride; the coconspirators represent industry, the military, and the public health community. At the book’s ending, the suspect chemicals are not proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, but we are left with compelling evidence that powerful interests with high financial stakes have colluded to prematurely close honest discussion and investigation into fluoride toxicity.”
CHEMICAL & ENGINEERING NEWS, “Is Fluoride Really All that Safe?”, August 16, 2004.
“On several levels, this book easily reaches the level of Wow… very much a Must Read…”
THE MIDWEST BOOK REVIEW
“Journalists and watchdog groups regularly raise hell about just the sort of industry corruption of public health policy described in The Fluoride Deception. We don’t brand the watchdogs as conspiracy theorists; we thank them for doing their job. After reading Bryson’s account of our national infatuation with fluoride, it’s hard not to wonder how we could have ignored so serious an issue for so long.”
NATURAL RESOURCES DEFENSE COUNCIL, “On Earth” Newsletter, Fall 2004.
“Bryson, an investigative reporter, explores various aspects of fluoride information and disinformation, from huge industrial exposures in making atom bombs to the much lower doses desired to protect teeth from decay. This is a well-researched, well-written, and well-referenced account… [A]n interesting, thought-provoking, and eye-opening work. Summing Up: Recommended. All levels.”
CHOICE Magazine (Current Reviews for Academic Libraries) March 2005
“This startling and terrifying book could not be more timely.”
THE ECOLOGIST, “Book of the Month”, September 2004
“This shocking anthology of incriminating stories and scientific discoveries is a must read for every consumer who owns a toothbrush.”
E MAGAZINE, “The Toxic Compound with a Polished Image” July 1, 2004.
“Christopher Bryson is an excellent narrator, and he reports on recent research previously not known to me… It is my sincere hope that his book will receive the attention it deserves and that its implications will be seriously considered.”
DR. ARVID CARLSSON, 2000 Nobel Prize Laureate for Medicine
“As with landmark titles, such as Silent Spring, Bryson’s book is bound to become a seminal volume. Its thoroughness leaves little debate on the manipulation and deceit that has resulted in every facet of our waking lives being engulfed in a chemical pollutant.”
BRITISH COLUMBIA NATUROPATHIC ASSOCIATION
“In a court of law, circumstantial evidence is as good as direct evidence if enough exists. The circumstantial evidence gathered by Bryson is so vast, and so impressive-sounding, that lots of readers are quite likely to ask their dentists about whether they should continue using toothpaste with fluoride.”
THE CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER, “Fluoride is hurting us, investigator says”, August 22, 2004
“The Fluoride Deception by Christopher Bryson, just published in the US, examines the background of the fluoridation debate. Bryson, who has had the advantage of access to recently declassified files, concludes that fluoridation is a triumph not of medical science but of US government spin.'”
THE GUARDIAN, “A Kick in the Teeth”, June 8, 2004
“The Fluoride Deception points to the suppression of medical information, the sacking of experts who found damaging evidence of potentially nasty side-effects that governments didn’t want to hear and a powerful political lobby that grasped fluoridation as a cheap means of mass medication.” IRISH INDEPENDENT, “Teething Trouble”, June 22, 2004
“In much the same way biologist Rachel Carson warned us over forty years ago in Silent Spring about the havoc and harm being caused by the misuse of persistent pesticides, journalist Christopher Bryson here lays bare the secret story and hidden dangers of the introduction of fluoride chemicals from the cold war era into our drinking water. The Fluoride Deception presents a scorching indictment of how researchers and health care officials working closely with government agencies, big industry, and their attorneys have allowed themselves to surrender their responsibility for the medical well-being of their fellow citizens.”
DR. ALBERT W. BURGSTAHLER, former president of the International Society for Fluoride Research and Emeritus Professor of Organic Chemistry, University of Kansas
“The Fluoride Deception compellingly and inescapably exposes the murderous fraud that heads of state and industry have for decades perpetrated on an innocent public. Extremely well written and tightly researched, The Fluoride Deception is sure to become the ‘must read’ book in this important and burgeoning field.”
DERRICK JENSEN, author of The Culture of Make Believe and A Language Older Than Words
“Bryson is right on in his emphasis on the ineffectiveness of fluoridation of water with industrial wastes, and its risks of nerve and brain damage, and cancer, coupled with the long-standing industrial conspiracy to suppress this information.”
DR. SAM EPSTEIN, Chairman of the Cancer Prevention Coalition and Professor Emeritus of Environmental and Occupational Medicine, University of Illinois School of Public Health
Order a copy of The Fluoride Deception
Excerpt from the FOREWORD – By Dr. Theo Colborn
“Bryson writes with the skill of a top-selling novelist, but it was not his convincing storytelling that made me finish the book. It was the haunting message that possibly here again was another therapeutic agent, fluoride, that had not been thoroughly studied before it was foisted on the public as a panacea to protect or improve health. Bryson reveals that the safety of fluoride became a firmly established paradigm based on incomplete knowledge. The correct questions were never asked (or never answered when they were asked), thus giving birth to false or bottomless assumptions that fluoride was therapeutic and safe. Certainly, the evidence Bryson has unearthed in this book begs for immediate attention by those responsible for public health…
While reading the book, I kept thinking back to 1950, three years after I got my BS degree in Pharmacy and the year I gave birth to my first child. Fluoride came on the market packaged in pediatric vitamin drops for infants. Mothers left the hospital with their new babies in their arms and prescriptions in their hands from their dismissing physicians for these fluoride-laced drops. About that time communities around the country began to add fluoride to their drinking water. The promised benefits of fluoride were so positive that my dentist friends began to wish that they had chosen dermatology instead of dentistry. At that same time pregnant women were being given a pharmaceutical, diethylstilbestrol (DES), to prevent miscarriages, as well as DES-laced prescription vitamins especially designed for pregnant women to produce big, fat, healthy babies. I felt good when I dispensed the fluoride and DES prescriptions – they were products designed to prevent health problems rather than treat them. Now I can only wonder how many children were harmed because I and others like me took the word of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the USPHS, and the major pharmaceutical companies producing these products. We were caught up in the spin. We were blind to the corporate hubris and were swept along with the blissful enthusiasm that accompanies every new advance in modern technology and medicine…
Certainly the evidence Bryson presents in this book should cause those charged with protecting public health to demand answers about the developmental, reproductive, and functional role of fluorine in all living organisms.”
DR. THEO COLBORN, co-author of Our Stolen Future:
Are We Threatening Our Fertility, Intelligence, and Survival?
A Scientific Discovery Story (1996)
Other early reviews of The Fluoride Deception:
“Bryson has done some excellent research here. The book has Pulitzer Prize written all over it. He has taken things of which many of us were already aware, but added the crucial details, dotted all the i’s, crossed all the t’s. It is a sickening tale of industrial and governmental collusion to conceal from the public the dangers of fluoride pollution generated by so many industries as well as the nuclear program… No environmental activist with an ounce of intelligence or integrity could read this book and not be appalled.
The Fluoride Deception should become the basic text for those who would insist that science and integrity should inform public policy and that regulators should serve the public not the polluters.” DR. PAUL CONNETT, Executive Director, Fluoride Action Network.
ABOUT the AUTHOR
CHRISTOPHER BRYSON is an award winning investigative reporter and a television producer. He covered Guatemalan Army human rights abuses from Central America in the late 1980’s for the BBC World Service, National Public Radio and The Atlanta Constitution. In 1989 he was part of an investigative team that won a George Polk Award and Sidney Hillman Prize with Jonathan Kwitny at Public Television’s The Kwitny Report. In 1999 he won a Project Censored award with medical writer Joel Griffiths. When asked why he became interested in fluoride, Bryson responded:
I’m a reporter. I don’t know how many modern stories have the same epic reach of history and rich cast of characters as you will find in “The Fluoride Deception.”
I stumbled on the story in 1993. I was working in New York as a BBC radio producer and was asked to find “an American angle” on water fluoridation. Ralph Nader put me in touch with a couple of government scientists (William Hirzy at the EPA and Robert Carton at the U.S. Army) who opposed water fluoridation, and explained how the science underpinning the nation’s fluoride safety standards was fraudulent…
I just kept reporting.
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