RFK, Jr. Protects The Nation’s Precious Bodily Fluids

There have been several major events that have recently dominated the news: the tragic floods in Texas, the bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities, the passage of President Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, or, for those inclined to get their news from the New York Post or the Daily Mail, the Sean Diddy trial, the Bezos wedding, and Kylie Jenner’s breast implants.

However, one story that may have slipped under the radar was of particular interest to us at History, Rinse, & Repeat, a story so illustrative of the principle that history repeats itself that it caught the attention of both A.H. and me. That story is the report that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy, Jr., the driving force behind the Make America Healthy Again (“MAHA”), has ordered the CDC to reconsider its recommendation about the infusion of fluoride into America’s drinking water.

The battle over fluoride has been raging for longer than I have been alive, dating as far back as the 1930s. While the scientific basis for opposing fluoridization may have changed, the arguments to a large degree remain unchanged. If, in this respect, history has not repeated itself, it is only because the argument has never gone away.

The Discovery of Fluoride

Like many medical discoveries, the discovery of fluoride’s benefit fighting tooth decay was due almost to accident, although it was also due to the persistence of one young dentist. Edward McKay was a recently graduated dentist who opened a dental practice in Colorado Springs, Colorado in 1901. McKay was shocked to learn that many of his new patients, including up to 90% of the children born there, had teeth that were severely stained brown. Following up on this discovery, he became aware of a phenomenon well-known to his patients – that so many residents of Colorado suffered from the darkening of their teeth that it was known as the “Colorado stain.” McKay began what would be a decades-long quest to discover the cause of this discoloring.

McKay invited a dental researcher named Dr. G.V. Black to help him discover the root cause of the stain. He too was stunned by the prevalence of discoloration in the locals’ teeth. The two searched for the cause of the stain for six years, until Black’s death in 1909. Although unsuccessful in determining the cause of the stain, the pair made two significant discoveries. First, they determined that the stain developed only in teeth that were still developing. Once a child reached adulthood and his teeth were mature and fully calcified, his teeth were impervious to staining. Second, they observed that those whose teeth were stained, or mottled as McKay termed it, suffered fewer instances of tooth decay.

McKay believed that the cause of the mottling came from the drinking water, but could not prove it. His suspicions received some corroboration in 1923, at which time McKay traveled from Colorado Springs to Oakly, Idaho. In that town, there had been a sharp uptick in tooth mottling when the town switched the source of its drinking water. McKay advised the town to switch it back, and the brown stains quickly disappeared.

McKay’s quest next took him to Bauxite, Arkansas, unsurprisingly a company town owned by the Aluminum Company of America, or ALCOA. McKay traveled there with Dr. Grover Kempf, a scientist from the United States Public Health Service, which itself was a national agency whose remit included not just diseases, but water pollution. They published their study of the water, but still were unable to come up with a cause.

The publication of that study had an unexpected consequence. It reached the desk of ALCOA’s chief chemist, H.V. Churchill, who, sensitive to allegations that aluminum cookware was poisonous, sought to prove that the company’s aluminum mine had no effect on the town’s drinking water as any link would imperil ALCOA’s business. Using more sophisticated equipment, Churchill determined that Bauxite’s water contained high levels of fluoride. Churchill wrote to McKay of his findings. McKay unsurprisingly found high levels of fluoride in other water samples from towns where mottling had occurred.

This research brought a new character to the story, H. Trendley Dean, the head of the Dental Hygiene Unit at the National Institute of Health (NIH). He devised a more accurate way to measure fluoride. Comparing water samples across the country, Dean and his staff determined that fluoride levels of up to one part per million did not cause the staining of teeth in most people and, at worst, caused only mild staining in others.

It was Dean who took the story of fluoride to he final lap. He recalled McKay’s observations that victims of the Colorado stain had a significantly fewer incidences of tooth decay. So he convinced the town of Grand Rapids, Michigan to participate in a study of the effects of water fluoridation. Dean oversaw the study. The results were astounding. Grand Rapids saw a 60 percent drop in the number of cavities. The fluoride wars were on.

Introducing Fluoride

Dean proposed a slow, experimental roll-out of fluoridation, but his plans were soon overtaken by events. Dentists in Wisconsin, the home of Progressivism, sought to bring fluoride to everyone’s water as quickly as possible. They were encouraged by McKay, who was still involved in the movement.

The dentists were wildly successful. Touring the state with a large contingent of their peers, they convinced 50 towns to add fluoride to their water. In a mere couple of years, the results were incontrovertible. This prompted the federal government to approve fluoridation throughout the country.

However, the success of the fluoridation movement forced opponents of fluoridation to organize themselves. Opponents were motivated by assorted concerns. Some were leery of fluoride’s association with the aluminum industry. As noted, many believed that aluminum itself was deadly. Some of the most effective campaigns against fluoridation, including that in Seattle, emphasized that fluoride was a byproduct of the aluminum industry. Others opposed fluoridation for religious reasons. Many people opposed it for political reasons, believing that it was beyond the scope of government power to dictate to them matters of health. They opposed any action by the government to impose upon them what they did with their bodies. Some believed fluoridation was backed by chemical companies. Others simply believed that fluoride was harmful.

In 1955, the publication Scientific American conducted a survey of voters in Northampton, Massachusetts, who, to the surprise of many, voted almost 2-to-1 against fluoridation of water. The magazine found that opponents of fluoridation were mostly the elderly, those without children under 12, and those without a high school diploma.

Fluoridation inevitably became a political issue, and it attracted the attention of fringe political organizations, including the John Birch Society, the Ku Klux Klan, and various Nazi parties. Thus, one opponent of fluoridation predicted that fluoridation would produce “moronic, atheistic slaves” who would end up “praying to the Communists.” C. Leon de Aryan, editor of the pro-Nazi publication, The Broom, described the spread of fluoridation as a plot to "weaken the Aryan race" by "paralyzing the functions of the frontal lobes."

The participation of these fringe groups did much to discredit the anti-fluoridization movement. The movement’s proponents became the butt of numerous jokes, culminating, most famously, in the movie, Dr. Strangelove, where a lunatic Air Force general, Jack D. Ripper, launches a nuclear strike against the Soviet Union that cannot be recalled.

In one of the movie’s most famous scenes, Ripper, portrayed by Sterling Hayden, explains to British Captain Lionel Mandrake, one of many characters portrayed by Peter Sellers, his reasons for launching the strike. Ripper’s speech, condensed below (to omit extraneous and intervening dialogue), lampooned the anti-fluoride movement:

Have you ever seen a commie drink a glass of water? Vodka. That's what they drink, isn't it? Never water? On no account will a commie ever drink water, and not without good reason. [A]s human beings, you and I need fresh, pure water to replenish our precious bodily fluids. Have you ever heard of a thing called fluoridation? Fluoridation of water? Do you realize that fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual, and certainly without any choice. That's the way your hard core commie works. [T]oday, war is too important to be left to politicians. They have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought. I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, communist subversion, and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.

One suspects that no single phrase did as much to marginalize opponents of fluoridization as the words “precious bodily fluids” (a phrase that belongs in the cinema pantheon and which, to this day, leaves me convulsed with laughter, though it leaves A.H. stone-faced).

By the mid-sixties, the battle over fluoridation was, for all intents and purposes, over. The benefits of fluoride in the water were, to use a more recent phrase, “settled science.”

The Battle Today

The battle against fluoride was rejoined this year after a 2024 report by the federal government’s National Toxicology Program, which summarized studies conducted in Canada, China, India, Iran, Pakistan and Mexico, concluded that drinking water with more than 1.5 milligrams of fluoride per liter — more than twice the recommended level in the U.S. — was associated with lower IQs in kids.

Utah became the first state in the nation to ban fluoride in its drinking water. Other states and localities have followed suit. U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he plans to tell the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to stop recommending fluoridation in communities nationwide, and further said that he is assembling a task force of health experts to study the issue and make new recommendations.

There is one major difference in the fluoride wars. While opponents of fluoridization in the 1950s tended to come from families with lower income and less education, opponents today are more likely to come from those with higher education and incomes, according to a study in Australia. Recently, fluoridization was opposed by wealthy suburban areas outside of Portland, Oregon and in parts of Marin County, although Florida has ceased fluoridization as well. Thus, it is the well-heeled and academically credentialed who are now protecting America’s “precious bodily

Clearly, the federal study related to IQ does not serve to validate the theory of C. Leon de Aryan. The study may prove to be entirely misplaced. Nevertheless, it is a cautionary tale that consensus science is not necessarily settled, as we noted in the second piece we ever published on this site, The Medical World's Greatest Discovery Was Once Condemned As “Misinformation.”