Breastfeeding & fluoride

INTERNATIONAL FLUORIDE INFORMATION NETWORK

IFIN BULLETIN: IFIN # 846: Public Health warning #1.

September 15, 2003.

Dear All,

This is the first in a series of 14 bulletins in which I will be focussing on
public health warnings on fluoridation which are being ignored by public health
officials as well as many non-governmental organizations otherwise engaged in
protecting the public health.

1. The very low level of fluoride in mothers' milk.

For our first public health warning, we start at the beginning: baby's first
meal.

According to the Institute of Medicine (I0M, 1997, page 292), "The fluoride
concentration in human milk ranges from 0.007 to 0.011 mg/liter (Ekstrand et
al., 1984; Esala et al. 1982; Spak et al., 1982)." In other words the level of
the fluoride ion in mothers' milk is approximately 0.01 ppm, which is 100 times
lower than that added to the public water supply where water fluoridation is
practiced. This means that a baby, which is bottle fed with milk formula made
up with fluoridated tap water will be getting 100 times more fluoride than
nature had intended.

As far as the practice of water fluoridation is concerned we should be
concerned about this on two fronts. First of all this very low natural level of
fluoride in mothers' milk is telling us that fluoride is not necessary for
healthy teeth, healthy bones or healthy anything else. Mothers' milk has been
designed by nature over a huge period of time to present to the baby the ideal
mixture of nutrients for early growth. As apologists for fluoridation are swift
to point out the fluoride ion is readily available in nature -indeed it is the
13th most abundant element in the earth's crust, so it is not through any lack
of availability which causes it to be so low in mothers' milk. Indeed, life
evolved from the sea which has an average concentration of fluoride ion of
about 1.3 ppm. This low level further underlines the fact that no evidence has
been presented to persuade the scientific community that fluoride is a
nutrient. In particular, no disease has ever been shown to be caused by lack of
fluoride.

Some apologists for fluoridation, like a spokesperson for the Victorian
Department of Heath in Australia, have claimed that mothers' milk does not
guarantee an ideal nutritional mix for the baby. They give as evidence for this
the fact that in some instances mothers' milk is low in folic acid leading to
avoidable damage to the baby. However, this is not a good example because folic
acid cannot be made in the body and if it is low in mothers' milk it simply
reflects the fact that the mother's diet is low in this substance. There are
other examples we could cite where a mother on a poor diet, will provide a
poorer quality milk to her baby.

However, in the case of fluoride, a mother on a healthy diet, with an abundant
supply of fluoride, will not pass more than a miniscule amount of this on to
her baby in her milk. There is a concern where a mother is getting excess
fluoride in her diet about her passing fluoride onto her baby during fetal
growth because fluoride can cross the placental membrane. In China they have
found excess levels of fluoride in the bones and the brains of aborted fetuses.

Dr. Vyvyan Howard, an infant and fetal pathologist from the University of
Liverpool in the UK puts the situation this way:

"Nature appears to have evolved a mechanism of minimizing the exposure
of infants to fluoride. Human breast milk only contains between 5 and 10
parts per billion of fluoride, while adult blood contains between 59 and 640
parts per billion. However chloride, a closely associated halogen ion that is
essential for life, is present in breast milk at 360,000 parts per billion.
There must be an evolutionary selection pressure operating for this
selective exclusion of an otherwise highly diffusible anion."

The second reason for concern is the notion that fluoride is so low in mothers'
milk because nature was aware of fluoride's extremely high biological activity
and therefore had good reasons for keeping it away from the baby's developing
tissues. We now know that fluoride can inhibit many enzymes; can interfere with
the normal fucntioning of several metal ions like calcium and magnesium, and in
the presence of a trace amount of aluminum can switch on G-proteins, thereby
interfering with he messaging system of many important messengers such as water
soluble hormones, growth factors and neurotransmitters.

In 1978, Dr. Arvid Carlsson (Nobel laureate in Medicine in 2000) offered as one
of his key reasons for opposing fluoridation in Sweden, was the concerns he had
about the extra exposure to the developing brain cells of a new born baby
bottle fed with formula made up with fluoridated tap water.

This concern appears prophetic now that evidence from China indicates that
children's IQ appears to be lowered by water containing as little as 1.8 ppm
fluoride (see Public Health warning #9, to come).

Paul Connett, PhD, Co-Founder,
Fluoride Action Network
http://www.fluoridealert.org