The Fluoride Deception

Book excerpt: With the narrative punch of Jonathan Harr’s A Civil Action and the commitment to environmental truth-telling of Erin Brockovich, The Fluoride Deception documents a powerful connection between big corporations, the U.S. military, and the historic reassurances of fluoride safety provided by the nation’s public health establishment. The Fluoride Deception reads like a thriller, but one supported by two hundred pages of source notes, years of investigative reporting, scores of scientist interviews, and archival research in places such as the newly opened files of the Manhattan Project and the Atomic Energy Commission. The book is nothing less than an exhumation of one of the great secret narratives of the industrial era: how a grim workplace poison and the most damaging environmental pollutant of the cold war was added to our drinking water and toothpaste.