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Wendy Myers: Hello, everyone. My name is Wendy Myers. Welcome to the Myers Detox Podcast. You can go check out my site at myersdetox.com to learn all about heavy metal toxicity and how to detox metals and chemicals and toxins from your body and how they are making you sick and are a big hidden underlying root cause of your symptoms. I want to teach you how to be proactive and take your power back, get your life back with the power of detoxification. Today, we have Melissa Gallico on the show and she’s an expert in artificial water fluoridation and we’re going to be talking about how fluoride makes you sick and the story behind why on earth, we are still fluoridating our water, it just boggles the mind, why we are still doing this.
We explain the origins of why this is happening, why it’s still happening, big surprise, big corporate interest but we’ll talk about fluoride toxicity symptoms, including acne and cystic acne and teeth spots, like they could be white or dark spots on your teeth and lots of other symptoms, pores and sleep issues as well and why reactions to iodine supplementation are really fluoride detox symptoms because when you take iodine, you push out and displace fluoride from your body and also, we talk about fluoride sensitivity, some people are very, very sensitive to fluoride and that’s the big cause of their symptoms and they just have no clue.
We’ll talk about why our water filter likely is not filtering fluoride and sources of fluoride toxicity besides water, there’s lots of hidden sources out there, wink, wink, your dentist trying to give you a fluoride treatment on your teeth. Lots of interesting topics like that and more on the show today. This is such and interesting conversation and I asked a lot of the questions that I have, we’ve never done a show on fluoride before but it’s on very common thing that we’re all exposed to or if we’re not drinking properly filtered water, we’re getting it every day in the shower, so we talk about a lot of hidden sources and solutions, what you can do to remove fluoride, detox fluoride and lots of interesting tips and tricks on the show today.
I know you guys are listening to the show because you are concerned about the levels of toxins in your body, so I created a two minute quiz that you can take at heavymetalsquiz.com. After you take this quiz, you’d get your results that will tell you the relative levels of toxins you have in your body, based on these lifestyles questions that I developed and after you take the quiz, you get a free video series that tells you what to do next based on your results, where should usually get started. A lot of people know they need to detox but aren’t really sure on where to start, what to take so I had this free video series for you after the quiz, so go check out heavymetalsquiz.com and take it, it only takes a couple of minutes.
Our guest today, Melissa Gallico is a former military intelligence officer, FBI analyst and Fulbright Scholar to the United Kingdom and as host of the Fpollution podcast, she follows a paper trail of documentary evidence including declassified government memos, internal industry communications and legal filings to show how corporate polluters corrupted the science on the safety of long-term low dose fluoride exposure. Gallico is also the author of The Hidden Cause of Acne: How Toxic Water Is Affecting Your Health and What You Can Do About It, published by Healing Arts Press, with a foreword by Stephen Harrod Buhner.
She has a degree in science and technology in internal affairs, STIA from Georgetown University and a masters degree in international security studies from the University of St. Andrews. You can find Melissa on fpollution.com, listen to her podcast and check out her book at hiddencauseofacne.com. Melissa, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Melissa Gallico: Thanks for having me.
Wendy Myers: Tell us how you go from being an FBI intelligence analyst to an author, then to a podcast host intent on exposing the pollution story behind fluoride.
Melissa Gallico: Well, it wasn’t a direct route. I worked in the intelligence field for 16 years, first in the military and then with the FBI and during that time, I had the opportunity to travel a lot and I live in a lot of different countries. I noticed that when I lived in the United States, I had really bad cystic acne ever since, I was a teenager but when I went abroad and lived in certain countries, it just effortlessly cleared up on its own. I didn’t do anything different with my skin care routine, of course, I’m eating different foods and there was a lot of other variables. I wasn’t really sure what was going on. I just knew that when I lived in other countries, my skin was clear.
After 16 years of this, I finally figured out that I am hypersensitive to fluoride. It was just … at first, I read the literature on fluoride and perioral dermatitis which is an acne like condition, it’s very well-documented in the research that fluoride, topical fluoride like the fluoride in toothpaste can cause this kind of skin reaction so I just thought, is it possible that the fluoride I’m drinking has a similar reaction or causes a similar reaction. I just stopped drinking fluoridated water and right away my skin, really cleared up, not completely but dramatically improved. I knew I was on to something and then it was a matter of trial and error and there’s a lot of fluoride in different foods so I had to figure that out, like the hard way over time.
I was eventually able to completely clear my skin by avoiding fluoride in my water in my diet. Then, I just thought, I can’t be the only one with this weird allergy. I wrote just a free PDF guide and I put it on the internet and I started hearing from so many people and I just thought, this can’t be possible, like that it’s this common and then a woman sent me an email with the words, your book saved my life and I just … I thought I have to turn this into a real book. It wasn’t a real … it was a pamphlet that I threw together so I turned it into a real book and put it on Amazon and eventually a publisher saw it and that’s how I ended up becoming an author.
It wasn’t really by choice. Just kind of, I really had to investigate for my own health and then I ended up doing the podcast just because so few people understand the pollution story behind fluoridation and I really wanted to expose that so that’s how I ended up there.
Wendy Myers: What is the name of your book?
Melissa Gallico: The book is called The Hidden Cause of Acne. Stephen Harrod Buhner wrote the foreword, which I was so excited about because he’s one of my favorite writer. He writes a lot about natural cares for Lyme disease and dealing with herbs. He has a great book on beer and plant life. He wrote the foreword and it came out last year from Inner Traditions Press.
Wendy Myers: Okay, fantastic, so you had mentioned that you have a podcast. It’s called hashtag Fpollution, which I love that and your main argument in your podcast is that artificial water fluoridation is a pollution story. What is fluoride have to do with pollution, what is this fluoride doing to our bodies?
Melissa Gallico: A lot of people don’t realize that the fluoride added to water is actually a waste product of phosphate fertilizer manufacturing. That’s where over 90% of it comes from in the United States. They purchase it directly from the smoke stacks of the phosphate fertilizer plants mostly in central Florida and the pollution started behind fluoridation. A lot of people who are active trying to end fluoridation, think that it’s because these plants were trying to get rid of their hazardous waste product and they convinced the country to start putting fluoride in the water, that it was good for you but the real pollution story is that fluoride is a common byproduct of a lot of mining operations like mining for aluminum or steel or coal.
It pollutes fluoride into the atmosphere and back in the 1940s, the 1950s when fluoridation was being introduced, there were a lot of lawsuits because fluoride air pollution was harming cattle, vegetation and human health around these factories. The polluters hired scientists to defend them in court against these lawsuits and that’s the foundation of the science that says fluoride is safe in the small amount that’s added to water because it was very similar to the amount people were being exposed to in the air. They needed it to be safe because if they were to be vulnerable to lawsuits for personal injury lawsuits to human health, their industry would collapse because all of their workers would sue them and everybody around the plants would sue them.
That’s where the science really became skewed, is because of that huge financial interest in proving fluoride is safe. That’s what I lay out in the podcast and I use my FBI background, I have the paper trail, I have all of the primary source documents showing … the court documents saying, like look dentist say it’s safe and it’s the same amount so it couldn’t possible be bad for you and they were very successful in avoiding these lawsuits. They weren’t able to stave off the lawsuits over cattle and vegetation. They ended up spending millions of dollars but they never had to pay for all damage that they did to human health and their workers and in the people living near these factories, so that’s the pollution story.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, and then what’s the next step, like how is it … why is fluoride being added to the majority of the water systems in the United States?
Melissa Gallico: That’s really interesting how it kind of progressed from, it’s not bad for you and actually it’s good for you. Dentists started noticing the connection between fluoride and teeth originally in a negative way because fluoride causes a condition called dental fluorosis and it can manifest in different ways, either dark spots on your teeth or it could bright white spots. A lot of people have them. Right now, it’s 60% of adolescence have dental fluorosis which is a very early sign of fluoride toxicity so when you have too much fluoride in your body, when your teeth are forming you’ll develop dental fluorosis.
That’s why dentists were interested in fluoride and then those studies turned into … I lay out the letters in the book where these industry researchers, it was actually someone who is being funded by the sugar industry, who first thought … first started studying it here in the United States. Maybe fluoride is why certain diets prevent cavities. They weren’t studying like all the fat soluble nutrients that we look at or iodine or different things that are really important for your health. They were looking at fluoride because of the connection with dental fluorosis and that was very popular, the public really wanted that. They wanted … and fluoride occurred in water naturally, in these places that had high rates of dental fluorosis. Sometimes it was pollution but sometimes it was natural so it had …
Wendy Myers: Yeah, you’re supposed to have a little bit of fluoride in your body, there’s some in the springs, people are drinking spring water, there’s a tiny little bit, you’re supposed to have a little bit in that.
Melissa Gallico: Exactly, yeah. We can handle … like the average fluoride content of spring water is 0.05 so it’s very, very low. Your body can handle that very easily. The amount they’re adding into the water is 14 times that amount so it’s a lot higher than what we’re being exposed to naturally, plus we’re exposed to it in so many other sources like pesticides and pharmaceuticals and antibiotics, all these kinds of things which we can talk about. We’re just overloaded with it and yet they’re still putting it in the water based on this 1950 science.
Wendy Myers: Yeah and so, we’re getting the fluoride from chemical fertilizer plants which is a very toxic process.
Melissa Gallico: I know. I know. It’s not filtered and they’ve done a lot of analysis that show it also contains lead, arsenic, aluminum, all of these other contaminants that are found naturally in the earth that you do not want in your water supply are coming along with the hydrofluoric salicylic acid that they’re putting in the water so it’s really important that we stop doing that.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I’m assuming there’s cadmium also because cadmium was a big byproduct that’s present in these chemical fertilizers, a lot of it is coming from Morocco, some of the mines out there, that they … where they get these chemical fertilizers in Morocco so there’s definitely cadmium probably in it as well.
Melissa Gallico: Yeah, you can ask your local water provider for an analysis of the hydrofluoric salicylic acid and you can see the amount of arsenic and the amount of lead that they are intentionally adding to the water.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, it’s just crazy. One thing to be aware of is that say, even if you are drinking filtered water, so you have your Brita filter, a lot of these little filters and you’re seeing … or the pitcher filters will get out some fluoride and improve the taste but it’s not 100% guaranteed it’s removing fluoride and even if you’re eating or drinking perfectly filtered water, spring water, you’re still showering everyday in fluoridated water and so can you talk about that a little bit?
Melissa Gallico: Yeah, so the zinc filters like the carbon filters really aren’t designed for fluoride. They don’t have much of an impact and the little shower filters that you put on your shower, unfortunately, those don’t filter fluoride from the water. Even the general like the Berkey filter is really popular, they have a separate fluoride filter that you had add on to it because you need something extra to get rid of the fluoride. Reverse osmosis is a really popular way to remove fluoride but even some of the people in my Facebook group, is designed for fluoride sensitivity, it doesn’t remove enough or it’s not as effective as some other types of fluoride so they’ll maybe have like a bone char filter, along with the reverse osmosis filter to really get rid of the fluoride.
That depends on your sensitivity, how heavy duty of a fluoride filter you need. Then, like you mentioned, you definitely have to be cognizant of fluoride that you’re being exposed to in the shower or in baths. I know some people are so sensitive, they can’t even wash their hands in fluoridated water. That is a lot more difficult but they do make bone char filters that you can put on your whole house, if you are able to install whole house filter, that’s a really good option for limiting the fluoride that you’re exposed to in the shower.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, so just know if you have a water filter of any type, if it doesn’t have a specific fluoride filter on it, you’re not getting the fluoride out of your water.
Melissa Gallico: Well, reverse osmosis is effective. That gets rid of a lot of things …
Wendy Myers: Except for that one, yeah.
Melissa Gallico: For the most of the fluoride too, yeah and distillation of course, that is very effective at removing fluoride so if you have like a steamed distiller, that will get rid of all of the fluoride as well.
Wendy Myers: Okay, fantastic, fantastic. If fluoride is a health hazard, even at levels out of the community water supplies, why would public health officials go along with these corporate polluters and claiming that it’s safe. Is that a conspiracy, is someone getting paid off here because I always think there’s someone getting paid somewhere to allow this poisoning of our population to happen.
Melissa Gallico: That’s what … I think so many people have a hard time getting around that because like how could it get by the CDC and the EPA and the National Academy of Sciences and the Surgeon General, all these big government organizations and working for a big federal government organization, it’s easier for me to understand how these outside influence can shape the policy. In the podcast, I devote one episode to like each major government organization and tell the story of how it happened and for example, with EPA, I interview some of the first presidents of the EPA Union because fluoridation was one of the first issues that came to their attention when scientists started complaining that they were being pressured to say fluoride was safe when really they wanted to say something else.
They wanted to make the limit much lower. They wanted to make a policy that would in effect not make fluoridation possible. The union became very involved in trying to shape EPA policy because that’s the scientist. They were outsourcing their responsibility to other groups to like create the fluoride policy and the scientists were actually against it. They ended up trying to sue the EPA to get the policy changed to lower the maximum contaminant level for fluoride in drinking water. They voted unanimously to oppose fluoridation, testified in front of the senate, calling for an immediate end of fluoridation.
Nothing came of that and so these scientists that I interviewed, they are still trying to end fluoridation, some of them for 30 years or longer. That’s just one example of how politics really influences public health policy in a way that it shouldn’t and some of the financial incentives … in the 50s it was the lawsuits that they … but that was a big financial incentive but in the 70s, it was more … it costs money for these cities to filter fluoride from their water so when they have fluoride naturally or they have fluoride pollution in their water, it cost them a lot of money to filter it out and they didn’t want to spend that money so that’s why they pushed to have safety limits set as high as it is.
Right now, in the US, it’s four parts per million where in other countries, it’s usually like one, one and a half and that’s as much as you’re allowed to have in the water supply, so here it’s way too high and some towns have it … they exceed the safety standard and they don’t do anything about it. It’s not well-enforced in all areas of the US.
Wendy Myers: Okay, are you saying that the fluoride is just a pollutant that’s in the water but in some places isn’t the fluoride being added to the water intentionally?
Melissa Gallico: Exactly. Yeah, it’s both, so 70% of the United States, they add fluoride intentionally to the water supply and there are a few places where it’s either run off from fluoride pollution and it’s a high amounts of fluoride or it’s naturally occurring because fluoride is a common element deep in the earth’s crust and that’s why it’s a form of air pollution when you’re mining for steel or aluminum or phosphate, you come across the fluoride and they don’t need it and that’s why it’s … they release it in the atmosphere, it was killing all of the nearby vegetation. It could be naturally occurring just from fluoridated rock.
Wendy Myers: Okay, great and is there any hope inside, like is there groups working on this or maybe George Soros or just somebody who … find a fund, getting rid of fluoridation. I mean, do people need to rise up in their local community, what has to happen for fluoridation to stop or the dumbing down of the masses with this addition of fluoride in the water.
Melissa Gallico: The most effective at the local level is really to contact your city council because in most states, it’s up to the city council, they can decide to do it or not, the CDC just recommends it, they don’t force you to add fluoride to the water. I’ve heard from a lot of my readers who end up … they’ll clear their acne. For example, there’s a woman in Melbourne, Florida here near where I live. She had acne for 35 years. She had low thyroid, which is another common side effect of fluoride toxicity and then she figured out the fluoride connection, got fluoride out of her water, out of her diet and her thyroid normalized, her acne went away and she became very active in trying to get fluoride out of the water supply for her family and her neighbors and her community.
She just showed up at those city council meetings. She has people who will show up with her, like if there’s a vote or a big thing but most part it was just a one woman show, going every two weeks at the city council and they agreed to read two pages a week so she would send them like a new study that came out or some historical documentation and they have voted twice. They’re very close to taking it out of the water just because she was very persistent so that is a very effective way to change things on the local level. Fluoride Action Network mounts against fluoridation.
There are some big like national and global groups that are working on it as well and there’s actually an important lawsuit coming up next year where many of them joined together to sue the EPA for not enforcing the Toxic Substances Control Act with regard to fluoridation. That has …
Wendy Myers: I have read about that, that’s amazing, I love that they’re suing EPA.
Melissa Gallico: Yeah, it’s progressed pretty well, like through some pretty good hoops that they had to get through so they’re doing really well with that, one of the main lawyers from the Fluoride Action Networks so he’s been really smart about how he’s approached that lawsuit so we’re hopeful that that will make an impact as well.
Wendy Myers: It’s pretty sad when we have to sue the Environmental Protection Agency to protect us, right?
Melissa Gallico: I know, it’s sad.
Wendy Myers: Let’s talk about, why are we talking about this, what are some of the serious, very serious health consequences of ingesting fluoride, I mean, you mentioned acne. There’s lots of other serious health issues that people just are not thinking about, they’re just buying their Crest and their Colgate, full of fluoride and drinking the water and just not thinking about it, what are the consequences for these people?
Melissa Gallico: I wrote the book around acne just because that’s how I came to be aware of what was going on with fluoride and how it was affecting my health but as I mentioned, like thyroid conditions are often tied to fluoride and I’ve heard from multiple people who are able to clear up their hypothyroidism just by avoiding fluoride. Their doctor said, they’d have to be on a medication the rest of their life and they didn’t want to believe it so they did their research and they tried it, they went off fluoride and over a few months, their test results resolved and they didn’t need to take off the medication. That’s a really big one because it’s such an epidemic here in the United States, especially among women.
Other acute conditions like acne, some people get migraines. Their migraines are triggered by fluoride and I learned a lot from them because like they … it’s such an immediate reaction so that’s … they’re kind of the canary in the coal mine with certain things. Then there’s also … some people have gastrointestinal problems. They just feel sick when they’re exposed to fluoride and that’s especially like people who have been overexposed to fluoridated antibiotics. They just really can’t … they just don’t feel well when they’re exposed to it. Other long term conditions, fluoride causes the condition called skeletal fluorosis, so dental fluorosis is too much fluoride in your teeth.
Skeletal fluorosis is too much fluoride in your bones, in your joints and it’s very similar to … like the early stages of skeletal fluorosis is very similar to arthritis or other joint conditions, so nobody knows how many people in the US are actually suffering from early forms of skeletal fluorosis. They could be mistaken for arthritis or these other conditions, so that’s another common one. Then, one that’s been in the news a lot lately, even mainstream news publications that don’t often write about fluoride is fluoride’s effect on children’s neurodevelopment. There have been some really important studies that have come out in the last few years that show that prenatal exposure to fluoride actually decreases IQ in a similar amount to lead, lead exposure.
That’s really something important, maybe it’s just five IQ points for you but when you look at that on the society level, how much of our human resources we’re losing by getting rid of like … having the number of geniuses in a society and doubling the amount of people who need extra help because of mental problems, it’s really a dramatic impact on the society as a whole.
Wendy Myers: Doesn’t fluoride kind of calcify the pineal gland also and the pineal gland makes melatonin and you need melatonin to sleep so then obviously, it’s causing a lot of problems.
Melissa Gallico: Exactly, there’s a news that just came out, I just tweeted it today where they … it was some researchers in Ohio, I forget the school but they were doing studies with fluoride, fluoridated water. It was the amounts found in fluoridated water in rats and showing the difference in the pineal gland and I just tweeted, “Oh, why would anyone in the US care about this? It’s not like anybody here has sleep issues.” It’s such a huge problem like everybody should be talking about that but yeah, that’s another one. There’s a researcher in the UK, a doctoral student and she decided for her dissertation to measure the amount of fluoride in the pineal gland and she found the highest concentrations of any study that’s ever been done on any part of the human body.
It was in the pineal gland and these were all older people who had passed away but this shows over your lifetime, fluoride can really crystallize there.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I’ve heard that you can take some tamarind paste and put that, maybe one teaspoon and put that in a pot of greens or just eat that and then it helps to dissolve the fluoride around the pineal gland and help you get rid of that.
Melissa Gallico: Yes, I’ve read that as well. I have not tried that.
Wendy Myers: Yes, I have heard of it a couple of times. I like tamarind a lot so it heals through this medicine and I thought it’s really interesting you talked about the thyroid and that fluoride impacts the thyroid and why is that? If you look at a periodic table of the elements, you have fluoride and chlorine and bromine and iodine and so your thyroid hormones are made of iodine and so, fluoride competes with iodine uptake in the thyroid so you’re not able … because some people are also iodine deficient, they’re getting tons and tons of fluoride in their drinking water and shower and not any … some get though iodine in their diet whatsoever and so, how are you making your thyroid hormones, if all of this is happening.
By taking thyroid hormones, you’re competing without fluoride but yeah, your teeth is made of three iodine molecules and teeth pores is made of iodine molecules, so there has to be a balance somewhere where you got to get rid of those fluoride to heal your thyroid.
Melissa Gallico: Yes, the whole last chapter of my book is about my experience with iodine because being someone who is hypersensitive to fluoride and I was definitely overexposed to it as a child. I have all of this fluoride stored in my bones and throughout my body so when I started increasing the amount of iodine in my diet, I had the same reactions that I had from fluoride because it was unlocking all of this fluoride that my body had sequestered into my bones and things. It took me a while to figure out how to even include iodine in my diet without having those types of reactions but I was able to do that eventually.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, without iodine, it will push all the fluoride in your body. You need to take a binder when you’re doing that, at least soak up whatever is being released into your bloodstream what have you and so, also Prozac, that is made of fluoride molecules as well so anyone taking that antidepressant, I’m sure there’s other antidepressants that have a similar chemical formulation, they’re just popping fluoride pills, they’re taking their Prozac.
Melissa Gallico: There’s many drugs, a lot of the most common drugs contain fluoride because it helps deliver the drug to the cells because your body thinks, “Oh, I recognize this.” Maybe it’s mistaking the fluoride for iodine but your body just will absorb fluoride throughout the system so that’s why they add it to so many pharmaceuticals.
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Melissa Gallico: It’s in antibiotics, it’s in anesthesia and pesticides and all kinds of different chemical products that we’re exposed to on a daily basis.
Wendy Myers: Yes, yes and like the Fluoroquinolone antibiotics, you mentioned before, those can kill some people.
Melissa Gallico: Yes.
Wendy Myers: They absolutely can if you’re … genetically, you can’t tolerate that type of drug. Be very, very careful with the antibiotics we take. Are there some other common sources of fluoride exposure that we haven’t mentioned yet?
Melissa Gallico: Yes, some that really surprised and I had to learn this through the trial and error process, chicken products. With humans, fluoride will accumulate in our bones and it does the same thing with chickens so if they’re drinking fluoridated water or eating feed that is covered in fluoride based pesticides, there’s a really high limit for the amount of fluoride that you’re allowed to have on chicken feed and they’re eating that and it’s accumulating in their bones. One of the worst reactions I had was from … I thought I finally had it all figured out. I’m like, “Oh my acne is caused by fluoride,” so I had avoided eating soup at restaurants and until we moved to a non-fluoridated town and I thought, I can finally have soup.
I ordered chicken soup and I had a huge reaction to it and I thought, “What, what is this.” I know it’s made with unfluoridated water and that’s when I learned that chicken bones can be very high in fluoride so anything made with like ground poultry or chicken hotdogs or chicken lunch meat, they all tend to have little shards of bone in the finished product and they can be very high in fluoride. I took few years off from poultry products like that. I thought I just couldn’t tolerate them but then I found a farmer and he didn’t use fluoridated water and was all organic feed and they were free range and I had no reaction at all. I was eventually able to add it back in my diet. I just really had to make sure it was organic and fluoride free. That was one that was really difficult.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, that’s really interesting because I mean, even if, I’ll say a chicken or eggs are organic, they may not be fed pesticide-ridden feed but they may still just be drinking regular water out of the hose that’s fluoridated or has either was a fluoride, so it’s a tough one.
Melissa Gallico: Yeah, so I always recommend people like add that in, once you’re confident that your skin is clear and then you can tell very easily if it’s a source of poultry that you can tolerate, that you can have so that’s a tough one. Black tea is another one and I know a lot of people that are health conscious are drinking like Kombucha everyday but tea can be a high source of fluoride and that has nothing to do with being organic either, it’s just depends on where the tea has grown because tea is one of those very rare plants that just uptakes it naturally from the soil, so I had to cut out all tea and no more Kombucha. Even green tea will contain fluoride not as much as black tea but it still contains it.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, that’s why the teas are so healthy for us, because they extract tons of minerals and nutrients from the soils but that also comes with the bad stuff in the soil too, a lot of teas, I believe, in them also.
Melissa Gallico: Yes. Yes, and actually there was a study, not too long ago where there were some subjects who had clear signs of skeletal fluorosis, like the doctors were sure it was skeletal fluorosis and it was here in the US. I think it was in Georgia and they were drinking a lot of tea. It was there in the South drinking like gallons of sweet tea everyday and they thought, that tea must be really high in fluoride. They measured it and it contained fluoride but not the amount that you would expect to call skeletal fluorosis so they postulated that it was because, maybe the fluoride was hiding in the aluminum.
They dissolved the fluoride aluminum bonds and then they measured the tea and it was three times as much fluoride as they originally thought. I think our testing measures are still being developed and a lot of products probably contained more fluoride than we even realized just because it’s bound up with things like aluminum and things that aren’t really … we’re not good at measuring yet.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, and so peppermint teas are really high in aluminum and green teas can have aluminum and so all you tea fanatics, you’ve been warned because I’m like from Texas, I know, I was guzzling black tea every single meal, even breakfast and everyone there is doing that and usually drinking Lipton tea, that’s everyone’s favorite tea down there, so I don’t know what the fluoride levels of that tea but it’s in the water and the tea. It’s tough to avoid. Any other hidden sources of fluoride that we should know about?
Melissa Gallico: Anything made with fluoridated water even if it’s not … like for example, you wouldn’t think of cereal as something that contains water, like boxed breakfast cereal but if it’s made in a plant that uses fluoridated water in the manufacturing process, just because of the way it’s manufactured, the fluoride actually concentrates in the finished product. Certain cereals can be very high in fluoride, just depending on how they’re made but especially extruded breakfast cereals so the kinds that … made in the like little stars and Os and different shapes, that process uses a lot of water and they could be very high in fluoride.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, so any other …
Melissa Gallico: Of course, when you’re drinking like ready made beverages or things like that, like beer, if it’s brewed with fluoridated water, it will be high in fluoride.
Wendy Myers: A lot of the bottled beverages that we buy, they are not made with purified water or just turn on the tap.
Melissa Gallico: Yeah.
Wendy Myers: A lot of the bottled water that’s marketed is alkaline water, what have you. It’s not very well purified, it’s just tap water basically.
Melissa Gallico: Yeah, one that makes people pretty sad when I tell them is wine from California, there’s a part of California where they use a lot of fluoride based pesticides on their great products and it’s mostly because they grow half the world’s raisin supply in this one part of California and when you have that kind of monocropping, you really need to rely on pretty toxic pesticides so they put a lot of fluoride based pesticides on those crops and sometimes they use that for grape juice so like Gerber’s grape juice could be … there was a study where it was like over six parts per million fluoride which is way above the maximum contaminant level for fluoridated drinking water. That’s something to watch out for, any type of grape products including wine and grape juice and raisins.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, so everyone kind of bust out your tamarind paste and start eating that. One tablespoon a week. That’s the prescription. Yeah, and so … yeah, and just like so many things that we’ve talked about on this podcast, it’s very depressing because we’ve been eating all this stuff and drinking bad water and showering everyday in fluoridated water, and so chances are, that you have quite a bit of fluoride built up in your body and so, what are some things we can do today to start limiting our exposure to fluoride and then also remove it.
Melissa Gallico: Definitely make sure you have a good reliable source of fluoride free drinking water, that’s a great place to start, very easy to switch your oral health care to fluoride free products. There’s so many now that are available at health food stores or online and then just switching to an organic diet will really take out a lot of the fluoride but if that’s not really in the budget, just focus on poultry products and grape products. You definitely want that to be organic and then looking into any pharmaceuticals you’re taking and just … you can look it up on Wikipedia and look at the chemical structures and see if there is any F symbols in there, that will tell you if it’s fluoride based and then maybe talk to your health care provider about switching to something else.
Then as far as detoxifying from fluoride that’s all the things that you talk about on your show, your infrared saunas, those are great for helping your body process out fluoride, a really good nutrient dense diet and iodine is the one that really I ended up focusing on as a way to detoxify fluoride for me personally.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, it’s so key and so many people with thyroid issues are concerned about iodine, especially if they have Hashimoto’s which is autoimmune thyroiditis but you can’t heal thyroid unless you give it iodine. I’m sorry, I just personally feel like, even if it’s a small amount, even if you react, you could start with a very, very, very small amount, work your way up, it takes your body a minute to have the joy you can have, you can get heart palpitations and feel anxious and maybe have trouble sleeping for a minute, while your body is adjusting but it’s … but you can also just start with a very, very small amount in titrate but I know some people, that just … they can’t even tolerate a minimum amount of iodine.
They may need to start with … just switch to a different form of iodine or perhaps just start taking binders and the tamarind paste and doing other things to get rid of fluoride because it could be just, not that they’re reacting to the iodine but the fluoride detox, and that’s a very, very good point you made.
Melissa Gallico: That’s exactly what was happening to me, I was so sensitive to it, I couldn’t even take small amount of iodine. I couldn’t handle it in food because you have no way of controlling the dose that you’re getting and so it took me a long time to figure out but that was the key was starting with a very small amount, 20 micrograms, that’s what I started with, one drop of Dulse Liquid which was 20 micrograms and then I doubled it so I was at 40 and I doubled it to … added another drop so I was at 80 and just by increasing so slowly, I was able to eventually work up to a really healthy dose of iodine without experiencing any of those side effects.
Then it did help to have all of the companion nutrients and to be doing my regular just health detox baths and things like that, that I … but I was doing anyway. The key was starting very slow and going very slowly to increase the amount of iodine.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I think generally, most people should be getting at least 300 micrograms a day of iodine but not if you don’t tolerate that and just work your way up and I even have had clients take 5,000 micrograms a day. That’s totally safe, that’s what the Japanese get in their diet on average. Higher amounts are not necessarily bad. Everyone is different. It’s just a matter of what you tolerate, and what you need and I think a lot of people need a lot of iodine because they have so much fluoride and chlorine competing, you’ve got to throw in a lot of iodine in the mix to compete with that stuff if you aren’t able to do a whole house water filter or you don’t have an adequate shower filter, you’ve got to do something to protect your thyroid and help your thyroid function.
Melissa Gallico: Exactly.
Wendy Myers: Then, let’s talk about toothpaste and like dental treatments, the dentist are always trying to shove up on you to make extra $25 for the fluoride seal at the end of your dentist treatment. Let’s talk about that, why don’t more people know that they’re not supposed to use fluoridated toothpaste and products and fluoride floss and dental treatments.
Melissa Gallico: There’s just so much money in marketing fluoride, it’s been sold to us for so long as a mineral that’s good for us, that we actually need fluoride but there’s no evidence that we need fluoride in any amount. It’s not considered an essential nutrient where they restrict it from the diet and you get these predictable side effects. Nothing happens when you don’t have access to fluoride in your diet. There are a lot of dentist now who are realizing that and realizing that fluoride is not the way to prevent cavities and so I always recommend if you want to find a dentist who understands how to prevent cavities, look through the International Academy of Oral Medicine and Toxicology.
They have a huge membership and they have a directory on their website and you can hopefully find someone in your area who won’t try to push fluoride treatments on you and will instead help you understand the underlying causes of cavities and how you can prevent them in yourself or your children. There is such a great resource and I’m really grateful for them because they’re very outspoken about fluoridation and about the need to end it.
Wendy Myers: Yes, so no more Colgate, just toss that in the trash because it’s literally toxic waste that you’re putting in your body and it says, on the label, “Warning, if swallowed, seek out Poison Control Center.” I mean, this fluoridated toothpaste is very toxic to the body.
Melissa Gallico: Yes, so often, I was just speaking with someone who told me when she was a kid, she used to like the taste of toothpaste so she always like swallowed some and then she’s like, “And every morning, I felt sick and like they never … our parents never thought to put it together.” You’re getting sick because you’re swallowing your toothpaste, how often does that happen, especially with the bubble gum flavored toothpaste and things like that. It’s really something … it’s very dangerous, you really shouldn’t be telling your child to put it in their mouth and brush with it twice a day. Thankfully, there are so many brands that are fluoride free now.
Wendy Myers: Yes, and my mother bought my daughter Winter, some toothpaste when she went to visit and I’m like, “Nope, that’s going in the garbage,” and then I explained to her why we’re not using that toothpaste and why we’re using this other one. Also, when it comes to preventing cavities, I mean, oral probiotics are amazing at cavity prevention, there’s lots of great brands out there now or just some oral bacteria that will help to counteract the bacteria that causes cavities.
Melissa Gallico: Yeah, and when you ask about the reason that they’re still pushing fluoride, another big financial incentive was the sugar industry, there’s a lot of documentation, I just shared something on Facebook where it was a meeting of the American Dental Association and they’re talking in the meeting about how … well, we can’t tell people not to eat sugar because it’s so important for the world economy you know. It’s just like, they’ve had such a stronghold on dental policy for so long. There’s some really good research that shows in the 1970s when President Nixon came out with the National Caries Program. He was determined to end dental decay in a decade and he put a lot of money into it and the sugar industry pretty much directed where that money went.
Of course, they’re not going to direct it into limiting sugar and so they like things like fluoride because it has nothing to do with limiting sugar so they have been another factor in pushing fluoride, fluoridated toothpaste, fluoridated drinking water on the American public.
Wendy Myers: Got it, it’s so hilarious how big corporations and big aggro are directing our health policies and misinformation that’s given to dentist because a lot of dentist listen without question, to the policies of the American Dental Association, when it comes to fluoride and then when it comes to mercury. You have to question everything because a lot of people go to their dental school or their medical school and they just don’t question anything. They don’t want to take their weekends researching. They’re just, I learned it and they just go about their day and they have no benefit whatsoever, monetary wise or other, to learn anything outside of what they were taught and tell and told.
Melissa Gallico: Yeah. It’s very sad because a lot of times the people, the dentist and the dental hygienist are the ones who are exposed to the most fluoride and they don’t realize it until much later in their career that their fluoride poisoned or they’re mercury poisoned and then they have serious long-term side effects. It’s really not fair to be asking them to work with these very hazardous chemicals and teaching them that there’s absolutely no side effects.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, and dentistry has the highest suicide rate of any profession and it’s because, I don’t know if this is a correlation but I believe it’s because of the mercury and fluoride that they’re exposed, among the other chemicals with lots of blue solvents and other things.
Melissa Gallico: Yeah, that’s make a lot of sense. I do have a whole chapter in the book about how, I always felt depressed all that whole time that I had acne and I realized, there’s actually a chart in the book showing that the times when I lived overseas when my skin was clear, I was also like just effortlessly happy and I never really put it together until later, when I look back and saw how I was being exposed to fluoride, it was affecting the way I looked at the world and I thought I was depressed because all my life was so hard but really, it was just being exposed to fluoride. Otherwise, why would it clear out when I just left a fluoridated town. It just went away.
Wendy Myers: That’s why I feel amazing, when I go to Europe for the summers too.
Melissa Gallico: Yeah.
Wendy Myers: I’m eating pasta and croissants and like, not really worrying if their food is poisoned or I was poisoned.
Melissa Gallico: Yes. I know. It is such a relief to be able to go out to all these restaurants whenever I’m … even like I’ve lived in places in Africa, Senegal, Tunisia and it was the same experience there. They’re not luxury places but I just was effortlessly happy, had no problems with my skin. They actually have amazing food so we’re really a little bit behind as far as the food scene goes.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. Is there any truth to the Nazis fluoridating the water to be able to control the population because we know that it hurts IQ and has other consequences, is there any truth to that?
Melissa Gallico: Not that I know of. I hear that claim a lot and there have been I think like a book of somebody who worked during that time period and made that claim in a book but I’ve never seen like the documentary evidence of it. I’ve never seen hard proof that that really happens so I don’t know, that’s kind of up in the air, I think it’s just very distracting.
Wendy Myers: I’m just curious. I’ve heard that a couple of times and like, “Oh, that’s interesting.” I wonder if that’s what they’re doing to us. They’re fluoridating the water and control us.
Melissa Gallico: Yeah, and that’s what a lot of people think and then that turns off a lot, other people were like, “Oh there’s no way that all of these government workers are poisoning me.” How would that even happen so that’s why a lot of people when you mention fluoride, they just write you off like you’re a crazy conspiracy theorist but that’s not at all what I’m saying, I’m just saying, this is a pollution story like a kind of a classic American pollution story that we’ve heard 100 other times with all these other industries. Yeah, I think the Nazi … maybe it happened, I don’t know but it’s also very distracting for people to understand what really happened here at the US.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. I mean, it’s not uncommon for big corporations to pay, to have their interest forwarded or demands met and it takes time for the public to wake up and then make these changes and make these public policy changes. It takes time for the government to change so I think that’s slowly happening and you mentioned a couple of things that people can do to be the activist in their local area. I’ve heard of other cities that have stopped fluoridating their water. Do you know how many cities off hand that have managed to stopped fluoridation?
Melissa Gallico: Calgary is I believe the largest city in North America to have stopped fluoridation. Now, of course, they’re always fighting to keep it out so the battle continues but they were able to stop fluoridation and my county here in Florida, we don’t fluoridate so there’s a lot of areas in the United States that doesn’t fluoridate especially smaller towns. Portland has resisted fluoridation, they were successful in keeping fluoride out of their water and they have a really good model for it so anybody who wants to take on ending fluoridation, they’re a good one to look to. Some places have a state mandate so that’s where it’s a little tough like Kentucky, there’s a state law that says they have to fluoridate. Those activist have to take it on at the state level but they’re very dedicated and we’re hoping that they’ll be able to make some progress soon.
Wendy Myers: Yes, that’s interesting you say that once some cities have it removed then there’s other forces trying to put it back, I go, do you know why that is?
Melissa Gallico: In Calgary it is so bizarre, it’s … one of the main people leading that is an ethics professor at a university and I just think the ethical argument against putting fluoride in the water is like the most clear, like even if it is good for you, even if it does prevent cavities, is it ethical to put something in the water to treat a condition, even if it’s just one person who objects to it, how is it ethical to put that in their public … the only public water supply available to them. It’s really bizarre to me that an ethics professor is like leading the crusade to put fluoride back in the water in Calgary and it’s a medical doctor who’s against it, who’s leading the crusade against it, so it’s very strange.
Wendy Myers: Very bizarre.
Melissa Gallico: Yeah.
Wendy Myers: People have their personal calling in life, I guess.
Melissa Gallico: Right.
Wendy Myers: Tell us about more things about what you’re doing to educate people and I know you have a program helping women to clear up their acne, bringing awareness to the underlying root causes of acne. Tell us about that.
Melissa Gallico: Sure. I have a 30 day challenge that you can join, just sign up on my website, hiddencauseofacne.com and the crux of the challenge is just avoiding fluoridated water for 30 days but everyday, I’ll send you a little email, explaining another source of fluoride that you might want to try to limit in your diet. Over the course of 30 days, you’ll develop this really comprehensive body of knowledge about how to reduce your exposure to fluoride. I also have a private Facebook group for readers of my book to ask questions, share experiences dealing with fluoride and acne and fluoride sensitivity in general.
Those are some good resources and then as far as ending fluoridation, I’m just helping local activist as much as I can with getting media exposure, contacting their local politicians, doing the podcast to raise awareness of this pollution story behind fluoridation and I’ve just finished season one and now, I’m going to focus on bringing some real world stories, other people, besides me who are fluoride sensitive, bringing their stories to you to … so people can see like what it’s like when you have this fluoride reaction. How did they figure it out, what triggers it, what did they do to get rid of it. That’s what I’m focusing on now.
Wendy Myers: Fantastic, and so tell us where we can find you, where we can find your podcast and your program.
Melissa Gallico: My website for the book is hiddencauseofacne.com and for the podcast, it’s Fpollution so just the letter F, little chemistry joke there, periodic table joke but also the double entendre so Fpollution.com. You can find it on iTunes or Spotify or wherever you listen to podcast and the Facebook group is called Fluoride Free Faces.
Wendy Myers: Fantastic, well, everyone go, sign up, join, listen and Melissa, thank you so much for coming on the show to educate us about fluoride. It’s a really, really interesting conversation that I know so many people are going to benefit from.
Melissa Gallico: Well, thank you so much, it was a pleasure talking to you.
Wendy Myers: Thank you, so everyone, thanks for tuning in to this week’s episode of the Myers Detox Podcast. I try to educate you every week about different topics around pollutants, toxins, how to detox them and why this is happening, what you can do about it. You have so much control, you can get this stuff out of your body and get your life back so thanks for tuning in. I’ll talk to you guys next week.
