In this clip Dr. Virtue discusses the dangers of fluoride and mercury as they relate to your health. Click the link below to start the audio:

Dr. William Virtue - The Dangers of Fluoride and Mercury

If you’re prefer to read Dr. Virtue’s comments, here is the transcript:

JR: We’re going to talk about fluoride, which I think – we all grew up knowing that fluoride was what made your teeth better. There was fluoride in your water and it was what we were supposed to do, right?

DR. VIRTUE: Correct. We were taught that fluoride in drinking water was very beneficial, fluoride in toothpaste was beneficial, and pretty soon, fluoride was in everything. People probably have noticed recently—I mean, it hasn’t been in the paper but on the news—that the recommended dosage of fluoride in the water – well, in 1979, it was 2parts/million, and for whatever reason, there’s no evidence that 2parts/million works. In fact, the ADA has come out and said, “Drinking fluoride in water is not effective for preventing tooth decay.”

Now, they’ve reduced it to 0.7. Again, no scientific information – nothing that proves that it helps or does anything. In fact, the ADA, as I said, came out and said it doesn’t. I liken it to drinking suntan lotion to prevent sunburn; it doesn’t work that way. In fact, it’s a toxic poison that we’re ingesting – in our water supplies, in the ruse of doing some good, but in fact it doesn’t. So, it’s really a problem that we need to look at.

In my office I don’t give anybody fluoride. I don’t recommend fluoride in toothpaste; I don’t give children fluoride, because of its toxic effects on the body. There used to be—correct me if I’m wrong—actually a fluoride treatment.

JR: Oh, yeah?

DR. VIRTUE: Oh, yeah, they still do. They put [trace] in the kid’s mouth and have them sit there with the fluoride and soak the teeth in that. Now, fluoride is effective topically like that because it’s so toxic that it does kill the bacteria. But if the child were to swallow that—you always say, “Don’t swallow, don’t swallow; don’t swallow for 15 minutes”—they’d get definitely sick. I mean, they’ll throw up in a heartbeat. So, it’s really, really toxic material, and it’s got no function in the body whatsoever. There’s no biological reason to have fluoride in your body.

JR: Where did this come from?

DR. VIRTUE: Well, there are several theories. The most popular theory is it came out of the nuclear industry back in the Manhattan Project. Fluoride is a compound that’s used to produce fissionable uranium, in my understanding. Now, since that time, in the phosphate industry, when they’re mining in Florida for phosphate for fertilizer, fluoride occurs with the phosphate and it’s [pulled] off as a byproduct and has no marketable value per se, until you find out something like, “Gee, we can do a study [0:02:33] that they did up in New York back in the 40s that it prevents tooth decay”—which in fact was kind of a hoaxy study—and therefore a new industry was born which was putting fluoride in the water and putting fluoride in toothpaste.

JR: Well, that sounds to me like a prime example of if we say it enough times, everybody begins to believe it.

DR. VIRTUE: That’s pretty much true, yeah. Another thing that’s interesting going on right now is the big scare about mercury in the environment. “Oh, we’re concerned about the environmental impacts of mercury,” but no one’s complaining about the environmental impact of mercury in your body. It’s like, “Shouldn’t that be the primary concern – what it’s doing to us internally –and along with the environment?” It’s like okay for humans to consume mercury but it’s not okay for it to be in the lake. I mean, it doesn’t make sense. It shouldn’t be in either place.

JR: Yeah. And, you know, you hear—I mean, national media has covered this quite a bit over the years—you should be careful about what kinds of fish that you eat because they absorb mercury more readily. I think swordfish is one of those that you’re not supposed to have so much of, right?

DR. VIRTUE: That’s correct. And here’s how it works – whatever discharge of mercury is in our waste water. For instance, I said this before, when a dentist removes a mercury filling from you, it gets sucked into the vacuum, it goes downstairs, and it goes out in the sewer system. The sewer system – we know our sludge plants, whatever they do, they evaporate this material and then it is spread on fields and rivers.

Well, most of the water that goes out of those effluent plants into the rivers doesn’t remove all the mercury, so the mercury goes out into the streams and rivers. So, 40% of the mercury coming—that’s a conservative estimate—in our streams and rivers, comes from dental offices. So, that mercury goes on down the creek and gets into the fish and then the fish go into the bay and the bay goes into the ocean. So the shrimps eat this, and then something eats the shrimps, and then something eats the fish. And the swordfish or the mackerel is at the end of the food chain – those are the big guys. So, they’ve already eaten all the little guys that have consumed that mercury. So, it accumulates in the muscle mass of the fish.

Now, a lot of times, people go, “Why are the fish dying of mercury poisoning?” Well, fish are naturally high in selenium (it’s a mineral that occurs in sea water) and they’re a very, very high concentration. Well, selenium and mercury bind together. The selenium actually binds with that mercury, keeping it out of the fish’s nervous system, so he/she can function fine with a high level of mercury in the body, because it’s not engaged in the nerve fibers of the fish.

But when you eat that fish, your selenium levels are not nearly as high, so, that mercury gets distributed in your body. So, I warn people, particularly pregnant women, not to eat tuna fish. Tuna’s on the high end of the food chain, along with mackerel and—you can go on down the list—swordfish and that kind of thing.

So, yeah, I don’t eat those fishes. I don’t eat fish much at all because of that reason, that it’s very high in mercury. You got to be careful with that, particularly if you’re like me and you’re in a very high mercury environment anyway. All day long I’m sitting there – I don’t put mercury fillings in and I use all the latest technologies and techniques to eliminate mercury exposure, but in everything I casually do, my day of mercury inhalation is going to be higher than yours, you know, to the best day I’ve got. So, I want to do everything I can to eliminate it and avoid my overexposure; that’s why I don’t eat fish like that. But I like it – I like swordfish. I like tuna.