Turning Point: U.S. Lowers Fluoride in Tap Water + Parks & Rec Propaganda

The U.S. has finally decided to actually lower the amount of fluoride in tap water. Here’s a very lamestream treatment of this news from The Guardian (London). Thankfully, at the top of the article they admit in two fairly prominent bulletpoints that “too much fluoride a common cause of white splotches and streaks across teeth.” I believe this is called “fluoridosis,” which has been known to be a result of excess fluoride consumption, along with any number of complications, for a couple of decades or so. In any case, though they don’t hit very hard against fluoride in the article, the news is incredibly welcome. And it’s been a long time in the making.

I haven’t been drinking tap water for 2 years now. In fact, I won’t even bathe in the stuff. And actually, unless things get really messy in the public restroom, I won’t even run the stuff over my hands. I am glad they don’t have laws (yet) against not washing your hands after using the restroom; I’ve had to explain this antisocial behavior to many-an-askance-gazing fellow restroomer of a young age. Thankfully I live in a house with well water, so I rinse my hands fairly regularly.

I have only had positive benefits from switching to mainly Deer Park water (though I’ve sadly generated tons of plastic waste in so doing, and I am trying to find a way around this travesty). I will be the first person to tell you (if you hang out with me personally you know this), stop drinking and showering in tap water, and your health will improve immensely almost overnight. There are so many nasties in municipal tap water besides fluoride, it will make your head spin. Some of the worst offenders are:

• chlorine, especially when you shower
• estrogen-mimicking hormones
• human waste
• disinfection byproducts (DBPs)
• heavy metals
• pesticides
• herbicides
• pharmaceuticals

Convinced yet?

According to Leslie Knope, This Is a Response to Fearmongering

Sadly (and head-scratchingly), the general public and mainstream media have not practically acknowledged any negative effect to consumption of excess fluoride. I endured an entire episode of propaganda from a show I have enjoyed for the past 5 years called Parks & Rec, which chronicles the hijinks of overzealous bureaucrat–recently elected congresswoman Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler). It’s very funny, but often its mainstream gliberal (I coined this term) tendencies get to me, as it’s often a vehicle for really obvious propaganda. Even so, they do manage to make their libertarian character, Ron Swanson (Nick Offerman), out to be very endearing. The episode I’ll be taking apart is entitled “Fluoride.” Here is an episode summary from IMDB:

Leslie’s new bold attitude as a lame duck costs Ben his job at Sweetums, Ron helps Chris build a crib, and the department tries to find the perfect dog that matches the personality for every Parks Department employee.

Oh wow, that tells you nothing about the main plot of the episode. I wonder if they’re trying to hide something in light of possible legitimate science that has and will continue to debunk their antiquated allegiance to water fluoridation. Anyway, I’ll give you the scoop on what really happens.

For the entire episode, Leslie tries to sell the backwards citizens of Pawnee on fluoridating their municipal water supply “for the first time in Pawnee history!” As the cold open where she announces her benevolent plan introduces this scenario, I buckle in for a long and bumpy ride. As the adventure progresses, she starts getting flack from her constituents and rival politicians. Jeremy Jamm, the obviously Republican constituent who opposes everything Knope does just to spite her, even goes on television show “You Heard with Perd” with the following “fearmongering” message:

Jamm: Councilwoman Leslie Knope wants to put fluoride, which is a chemical, into your drinking water. You know what else is a chemical? Strychnine—and cyanide.
Perd (representing the supposed demagogues buying into the fearmongering): And dirt, and rust, annnd even broken glass!
Jamm: Exactly! You definitely understanding what chemicals are, Perd. I would suggest if you wanna contact the psychopath that wants to turn your kids into bad-at-math, Communist, fluoride zombies, well just call the number at the bottom of your screen.
(Leslie’s phone rings)

Ha Ha Ha! This is a new phenomenon I’d say. I’m going to call it demagoguery through satire. I’d love to be able to counter-parody these increasingly irrelevant alternative/indie comedy types that tip their pure propaganda hand with simplistic mockery that panders to “I get it!” millennials, who respond with immediate veneration when someone gets “slyly” put down in this ingenious, facetious way. However, I think if I were able to somehow lampoon the lampooners, the added level of sarcasm might get lost, and they would think I was just participating in the first level and dissing the original target. Usually the easiest targets are conservatives, Christians, gun owners, and now increasingly, alternative health people and hippy-types (see Portlandia for more examples of this paradigm shift).

Anyway, throughout the rest of the P&R episode they perpetuate this oversimplified portrayal of the American public, who idiotically lobby to protect their health—apparently that’s the majority of people now (not true at all). (You know, people like me and my wife, Dr. Mercola, or the Food Babe, who are dumb enough to be concerned about “toxic” substances in our food and water that are “hurting” us and our children.)  Leslie is just appalled at the opposition she gets to her radical (and positive) idea that will clearly only improve the health of her community. For instance, she “expected more from” people like her Mom, and sets the sophomoronic citizenry straight by yelling at them on the phone, “Stop right there! You know what? Fluoride protects your teeth and is perfectly healthy for you! …Well, if Jamm says that, then he’s a lying idiot, and if you believe it, then so are you!”

I hope my local congressman talks to people this way when they express ridiculous and unscientific ignorance-based concerns about Smart Meters, EMFs from cell phone towers, vaccines, glyphosate, and second-hand smoking. Hopefully yelling at people enough and telling them that they’re ignorant and have no understanding of science will get it through their thick heads. If you use the words science and evidence enough, and make them feel enough like a loser outcast fearmonger, they have to conform eventually to what the corporations—I mean the people—want.

The best part of this whole thing is the discussion with Congresswoman Knope where Tom Haverford (played by Aziz Ansari) lays out his strategy of “sexing up fluoride:”

“What if we called it something else? I mean we rebrand. No one cared about Calvin Brodis until he started calling himself Snoop Doggy Dogg… Leslie, you gotta give people something to get excited about. You told me to make the most of my job. I’m good at this stuff.”

Man, I hope there are bureaucrats like Tom Haverford out there making the most of their job and pushing healthful ideas like fluoridation of water supplies in small towns all across America. While they’re at it, they could push for more asbestos, lead, DDT, glyphosate, and BPAs just in general. These are things that are notoriously lacking in our communities, and if bureaucrats could just sex them up a little bit, everyone would clearly benefit.

 

After our heroes’ successful attempt to sell Pawnee on fluoride by calling it #TDazzle (hashtag included), Jamm and the opposition counterstrike by teaming with local candy manufacturer Sweetums to introduce a “drinking water” replacement called “Drink ‘Ems” as the new water supply for the town. Let me step out of my counterparody tone for a second and say that outside of the (extremely antiquated) pro-fluoridation tone of the episode, this would otherwise be a perfect way to illustrate the sinister nature of Leslie and Tom’s “sexing up” of fluoride. First of all, Leslie bemoans the content of the sugar in “Drink ‘Ems,” so I guess that sugar (not specified as refined) is an ingredient scientifically proven enough to be considered detrimental in certain doses, and we as the audience are being given the okay to conform to that thought, even though sugar in and of itself is a healthy substance present in plenty of natural foods. Fluoride is also present in water, salt, and food, yet safe amounts are not discussed in this unscientific comedy show, which has no business making calls about how to interpret existing scientific literature on any of these matters.

The Drink ‘Ems illustration demonstrates that if we’re adding things to a water supply, it’s tantamount to adding anything that somehow benefits people. The fact is however, that any dose of added medicine/minerals/substance to a natural resource is unnecessary and unwise at best. This is because the dose that might be beneficial or otherwise benign (if it’s something that’s added for pleasure or added nutrition, like sugar in this case) for one person, would differ greatly for another. Sadly, the creators of P&N fail to tap into the opportunity for profundity this part of their narrative affords, and they continue to double down and create a straw man for the foolhardy health-conscious opposition who do not wish for fluoridation.

One more “great” quote from our hero Leslie Knope for the road, where she puts us “alarmists” in our place:

It’s not gonna make a difference. I can’t beat them. All I have on my side is facts and science—and people hate facts and science.

This is just too precious. I’ve talked to a lot of people about exciting paradigm shifts in concepts about health, all from new facts and science that are coming down the pipeline in the ancestral health/Paleo movement. About 8 out of 10 of those people respond politely, then if you press them, they’ll often say something about their allegiance to science. In other words, they’re not willing to take your reporting of what they perceive to be totally anecdotal evidence as truth, even though you’re backing it up with new studies, or the lack of studies in the first place that ever supported the conventional wisdom they challenge. If you were to take a survey of the general American public, I guarantee you’d get something in the 90th percentile of people who identify as “scientific.”

People don’t hate science. This is an easily passed-off generalization to serve the purposes of a dumb satirical joke. It’s just lazy comedy.

Lazy Science

And it’s just lazy science, really, that people are identifying with. People seem to just go off of the latest study. And when the latest study comes out that might challenge what they believed, their response to the new info, if it’s definitive enough, usually results in their pretending that they knew it was true all along. Maybe paradigm shifts only occur after huge policy change, though. Take note of how people all around you start changing their tune about fluoride because the regulations have changed in response to the science. Perhaps the latest study isn’t enough anymore, and they need the government to affirm it. Makes me think of how the USDA has now given cholesterol a pass, and people who demonized it before talk about how they always thought it wasn’t that big of a deal.

Then again, there are some examples of people denying the new science absolutely because of their adherence to ancient dogma. At the live Sufjan Stevens show I went to, he doubled down on the “cholesterol-causes-heart-attacks” narrative while he was relating his views on death, saying something like, “A guy could die of a heart attack while eating scrambled eggs for breakfast.” I guess Sufjan didn’t get the memo from the USDA—or his brain subconsciously felt a need to rebel against the cognitive dissonance created as he skimmed over the news in his daily web crawl.

What I really don’t understand is the criticism and marginalization of those who express concern for things that could be potentially harmful. This has reared its ugly head in the form of the demonization of antivaxxers of late. Policy regarding chemicals/carcinogens can often be swayed according to the precautionary principle. The origin of that principle is the U.N., so I’m a little wary of it. Turns on my deregulatory knee-jerk reaction from my NeoCon days. The precautionary principle can definitely be abused to impede the free market, but in many cases, the policies that result from its employment are good for the consumer/the environment. A lot of times, the paradigm shifts due to dollar votes, such as buying organic and local or the purchase of natural supplements/alternate health treatment instead of relying on pharmaceuticals/surgery. The free market can take care of some of the problems, but policy and regulation can come into play when big corporations are concealing harmful ingredients or pollution they’re causing.

I’ve definitely become more of a precautionary principle guy now, because of GMOs, EMFs, herbicides/pesticides, and any number of toxic substances you have to tiptoe around to survive this modern life these days. In any case, try to err on the side of caution in your own and your children’s lives, being proactive by keeping up with the most knowledgeable experts (not claiming anything here—we’re just a funnel for good stuff). You will never regret listening to the health gurus about what to avoid, especially those espousing an Ancestral, Paleo, and Tribal perspective. Even if they sound like Chicken Little or fearmongers, listening to what they say and abstaining from modern life’s novelties can never hurt. They are thinking ahead and progressively to try and improve your life using principles from millennia and millennia of human wisdom about health.

Only in the context of how humans have thrived in the past and in nature can we start to understand our own bodies, maximizing the potential of self-healing through nutrition and exercise that conforms to a natural lifestyle (like the practically disease-free tribes that still exist in our midst). Fluoride and all of its nasty cohabitants in our drinking water do not fit into this plan. Please join me in continuing to rid our planet of the pollutants of modern life, no matter how much opposition you face. Eventually you’ll be in the majority.