I'll get a team. Welcome to another installment of the show. I hope you bloody terrific, Tiffany, and Cook is not here selfishly, she's having fun doing something else. But you'll listen to this because she's going to edit it. So edit a way, tiff And I hope you will. But Doctor Bill, thank god, it could really be a Doctor Bill episode without Doctor Bill, although these days that is becoming increasingly possible. But as best I can tell, the real version is here, mate, how are you? I'm great?
And yes I can verify this as the real version of Doctor Bill.
Yeah, I tell you what, how would you know if it wasn't? Though I know, I know it's it's becoming scary. We have a guy on a once a fortnight called Patrick, and he's like our tech guy. We just talk about. It's very light, it's fun, and it's all things tech, of which I am. You know, I'm a dinosaur, so I don't really I'm probably better than the average sixty year old, but I'm certainly you know, I'm certainly very low on the totem pole in terms of knowledge and
understanding of all things tech. But one episode we did, we just started just like this bill, And he said, how come I never get to host the show? How come I never get to And he used to work in radio, so he's very good in that. I said, and this is live. I said, oh, would you like to host today? I didn't know any of this was coming. So he opened the show and he asked me a question without letting me answer. He played an answer that he'd recorded using my voice, right looks yeah, yeah, so
he deep faked my voice. Now if you if we didn't tell you, you wouldn't know. So he did about the first four minutes of the show on his own, just asking these questions and then answering the and the most ridiculous and inappropriate answers that made me look terrible. Of course he did, but it was using it was literally my voice, so you could not even me listening to me, and I listen to a fair bit of me. I'm like, wow, that is apart from the fact that
maybe the cadence or the timing was slightly different. But if somebody didn't tell you, you would just think that was me just answering his questions inappropriately, because obviously he tried to throw me under the bus and make me look bad. But and that was probably six months ago. Way it's way better now. Yeah. Yeah, I actually have to write. I had to write in the overview of the notes, like I needed to explain to people the first few minutes are not real. It's not me. I know,
it sounds like me. It's actually AI. Yeah, it's it's pretty. It's like it's getting close to you know, indistinguishable, you know video as well.
Yeah, that's really worrisome because in the wrong hands, you can make or break somebody's life. With those sorts of stories, you know, one, it's going to become even more difficult for people to sort out fact from fiction.
Yeah, yeah, Well, one of the scams that they run, I'm sure it runs in the States, but it happens in Australia quite a bit, and it's been on the news where they've warned about this. But one of the scams is kids, Like people get a hold of their kid's voices, like eight nine twenty year olds who are traveling, who ring their parents and say, Mum, Dad, I'm stuck. I need you to send me two thousand dollars or and it's their voice and it's they're calling their parents.
I can't talk like I'm in trouble. You have to please send me this. I'll call and explain later. But I just need you to put this money in this account. And it is their child's voice, and they are traveling, and so then you get this distressed, emotional parent who just wants to look after their kid, so they just
put this money in account. Yeah, that's right. What they've encouraged kids to do and parents to do is to have like a code word, and if they don't hear that word, if that word isn't used or whatever, it is that kind of safety net, that verbal safety net where people know there's a code word and if they don't hear the code words. So yeah, but it's getting into scary territory, doc.
And it certainly is. That code word idea is a good one. I wasn't aware of this. Maybe that is a problem in the States too. I imagine it will be a global phenomenon shortly, because wherever a new technology seeps in, there's always going to be a cadre of nefarious people who take advantage of it.
In the worst wheeze, Yeah, definitely nefarius. We don't hear that word enough, all right, so you wrote or you were involved in a couple of articles that got quite a bit of airtime and attention recently. So we're going to talk about that, which I'm excited because a totally different topic for us. But one of them was about fluoride in drinking water, and one of them was about raw water or drinking raw water. So if you're okay,
we're going to start with the fluoride one. So the title of the fluoride article was, yes, fluoride in your drinking water is a good thing. And there's been I'll get out of your way in a moment, but there's been a bit of conjecture and debate about this, and I think RFK Robert Kennedy Junior, has been an advocate for getting rid of fluoride, and he's now got a new position in By the way, there's something big happening tomorrow in your neck of the woods. But we'll talk
about that maybe later. But so there are quite a few people who are saying, obviously it's not the moment the majority, it's a minority, but that fluoride in the water could be a bad thing. So tell us, tell us what we need to.
Know, right, So I did not expect twenty twenty five to be the year of water for me, so I had a couple of reporters contact me recently. Most of this is driven by the whole RFK Junior phenomenon, which is in my mind, just absolutely insane. But he is a proponent of a lot of very controversial and dangerous health items, and like you said, one of the things he's been pushing is the removal of this tiny amount of fluoride that we add to tap water just about
everywhere in the United States. Many other countries do the same thing, because almost one hundred years ago, it was discovered that areas where there was naturally more fluoride in the water naturally okay, there were fewer cavities and dental problems. So a correlation was made, and then we had literally one hundred years of stuff buddies that link fluoride to better oral health Okay, fewer cavities, less gum disease, and
so on. So it was decided about seventy five years ago that the United States would add fluoride into the tap water in order to help people mitigate and preemptively strike you dental problems. Fluoride works in two ways.
It is a.
Part, it's a natural part of the enamel of the teeth, and without it, the enamel is very weakened, so you need fluoride for good enamel. The other thing it does is it's an antimicrobial agent, which means it'll kill bacteria. Bacteria like to accumulate on our teeth. They formed this biofilm, They release acids and that's what starts drilling, drilling the holes and teeth, so it kills those bacteria as well.
So you got this nice one two punch that fluoride can deliver that study show substantially improve dental health time and time again. And the most convincing part of this craig is that, you know, it's been controversial ever since it was introduced because there was a proponent of people saying that this is not natural, which is bogus. It is natural. Fluoride is natural out in the environment. Of course, you can ingest too much of it. You can ingest too much.
Of anything, okay.
You can ingest too much water alone, and if you do so too quickly, water will kill you.
Okay.
So it's all about the dose, and the dose that the EPA has set for the United States is far below any toxicity level that's been associated with the many studies that have been done. So for someone to cling to some very weird studies or crazy ideas that fluoride is still after all this time, presenting some kind of health danger, to me, that's an extraordinary claim at this point, and you better have a bountiful mountain of evidence to back up your claims that this is harmful in some way.
And I'm not talking about a mouse study where you gave it, you know, ridiculous levels of fluoride over a short period of time and then say it causes cancer. Well, of course, but that you can't. That's not congruent to what we put into the tap water. So all the studies that RFK Junior and the anti fluoride people like to cite have serious problems like that, and they're not really equivalent to what we're what the EPA is doing with our tap water.
Yeah, it's this is a pot of science, and you'll way more qualified and you know, knowledgeable in this spice. But you know, for me, it's just interesting. I guess I'm somewhere between the average punter who has never done any research in an academic or an organized research capacity, and I'm somewhere in the middle between them and you.
And for me, it's just as I've at a very elderly age, dived into doing a PhD and having done an undergraduate degree decade literally decades ago, and then starting this research journey and then reading you know that I
needed to for my own research. I needed to get all the background and as you would understand, read way too many papers and try to understand and work through what's relevant and what's valid and the methodology and you know how how flawed that model or that design or that study might be, and you know the risk of bias of all of that. I just did a risk of bias assessment on one hundred and twelve papers or no, about five hundred studies in one hundred and twelve papers.
That was a nightmare. But yeah, it's like people tend to if people have a belief or an idea, or an emotional attachment to a concept, it's like they'll almost find anything that might support that. While not really understanding. Now I'm not advocating one way or the other. Well, I'm probably in the let's keep Florrida in the water camp to be honest, but like trying to understand that
not all science is necessarily science. You know, I know that sounds silly, but there's so much I didn't realize how. There's a word in Australia which is dodgy, and basically that just means untrustworthy, unreliable. But there's so much dodgy science there can be.
And I look at it from a professional standpoint as preliminary. You know, it's a preliminary study, and the public needs to understand that there are studies that are done that may have a very small sample size. They may be done in cultured cells, they may be done in rodent models, and you've got to be very careful conservative with those interpretations because if you start extrapolating those findings into what might be happening in humans, that's a really reckless thing
to do. So you have to compare it to what we like to use in the sciences. Is something called a meta analysis, and you may have heard of these, they're used quite commonly now, which is a study of studies. All right, So you compile a whole bunch of studies that look at the effects of fluoride in water and some of the papers that you might have mentioned or that RFK junior sites will be included in this study. And what happens at the end of the day is
they are dwarfed. These negative effects are dwarfed by the mountains of evidence that say fluoride is perfectly safe. In fact, if we remove it from the water, it's going to cause much more harm. So the cost benefit ratio, at least with the current evidence that we have in hand, is that removing fluoride from the water is going to
cause a lot more harm than good. Being a scientist, we're always open to new data and new evidence, and if something you know surfaces and is published in a reputable peer review journal that is beyond preliminary, that looks more unequivocal, or has been repeated by multiple independent groups, then we got something to discuss. Until then, we are wasting resources talking about this. It's just it's a no brainer. Seventy five years people are not dying of the types
of cancers that he's implicating here. If what he said is true, we would have a massive outbreak of bone cancer in the United States. Given how many millions of people have ingested fluoride over the past seven decades, and we do not see that, Craig. These claims are just simply false.
Yeah, it's I'm reading your article. I was interested to see that. Trying to find it. I think it said sixty three percent of the US population. This was a few years ago, maybe twenty twenty. Sixty three percent of the population that access to fluoridated water, but which made a third of the population didn't.
That's a lot still, right, That's a lot of people. So what those people by and large are on well
water or some other sort of non tapwater. You know, we're talking about rural areas, and those individuals usually receive additional fluoride treatments at their dentist, right, so if they can't, you know, and some of that tap water may be rich in fluoride greg it may have even more than what you've found in tapwater, Okay, because you can go to water sources all around the world and you're going to find varying mineral content, and fluoride is one of
those minerals that's going to vary depending on the location. So some of the people who might be on well water may even be ingesting more fluoride than what's in the tapwater because the tap water levels are very low.
Okay, so I was going to do these separately, but I actually think we can kind of synthesize these two articles so the other we can maybe jump back and forth. But so the other article that you contributed to quite a lot was it was called no, raw water isn't healthier than tap It could actually make you very sick. And so raw water is when I first heard that, I'm like, what is raw water? And then of course, so raw water is essentially out of a creek, it's rainwater,
it's from springs or streams or various untreated sources. But it's just water that hasn't been through any kind of process to be affected by anything.
Am I that that's right? And it was news to me too. I heard a raw milk, you know, non pasteurized milk, but raw water was a new one for me, and it took me by surprise that people were even considering doing this.
You know, it's just it.
Of course, I'm a microbiologist, so this kind of stuff really alarms me. But the idea that we live in you know the United States or Australia, these technically developed nations who have water purification systems that are the envy of the world. Okay, our nations have some of the safest water you can possibly drink, and then you got someone who wants to go out and drink out of a puddle. I mean, it's just what are you thinking?
What are you doing here?
And it's just the same with the fluoride people. These individuals are you know, vilifying fluoride. They're vilifying tap water, and they're doing it through these immaculate teeth okay, beautiful and teeth, I know, cavities, white teeth. They are denigrating the very processes that gave them good dental hygiene. And
I think it's just a slap in the face. It's so insensitive to underprivileged nations around the world who would give anything to have just a fraction of the water purification infrastructure that we enjoy in our nations.
I mean, it's just it angers me.
It saddens me that these privileged people are vilifying the very things that make our water supply so safe. And what other things scare me is that some of the government agencies in the US which are now as of tomorrow, going to fall under you know, under the Trump administration, they're going to control these agencies. There's a lot of check and talk. I don't know if it's going to actually pan out, but there's a lot of chatter and talk that these agencies their funding is going to be cut.
And when that happens, these agencies shrink in size and we don't have the public services or the quality that we normally enjoy that's associated with them. These are the last types of things that should be cut. You're damaging society by making cuts like this.
And you know, it's just.
It's just a really sad situation that a lot of people I understand suspicion and government. It's justified to a certain degree, but there are parts of government that do a really great job at keeping you safe, and those are not the areas you want to cut. And if you fool around and find out, it's going to cause a lot of pain and suffering and possibly even death. Why go down this road. Give you a quick example.
We already know what's going to happen if we remove fluoride from the water, because Buffalo, a city in New York, did that back in twenty fifteen without telling the public, which is a whole other can of worms. Wow, officials removed fluoride from the water without the public knowing about it.
So unbeknownst to.
The public, all the kids in Buffalo were getting alarming amounts of cavities all of a sudden, their dental health was plummeting, they were having oral surgeries, gum disease. And then an investigative reporter in twenty twenty three finally figured out that officials removed fluoride from the water. It was immediately reinstated in twenty twenty four after massive amounts of lawsuits and there's a first class action lawsuit and process now, so we know what's going to happen if we take
fluoride out of the water. Do we want every city in America to suffer what Buffalo just did.
I just don't understand this. It's so funny, Like, yeah, this is why I love having these chats with you, because I mean literally, like like our listeners, I'm literally learning as I'm going. I heard RFK on Joe Rogan. Obviously the pinnacle of scientific conversation, right, It's like it's the high water mark forget all your journals listening to Joe Rogan and JFK anywhere you go anyway anyway.
Well you're unfortunately, you're right, you're not alone. A lot of people will actually go to a program like that and believe that's what's true.
Well that was. Yeah, Like, I'd never thought about fluoride in water until I heard him. And I know the other guy's name, but I could be getting him mixed up, so I won't say his name, but I'm pretty sure it was RFK. Might have been a guy called Gary Brecker everyone. I could be wrong on that, but anyway, but there was a conversation around the dangers and I'm listening to this and I'm thinking, fuck, I didn't know this.
I'm going to have to I'm going to have to get a I'm going to have to just start drinking from the creek or I'm going to, like, we get the dangers of that too. Yeah. Yeah, I'm going to have to filter out the bloody fluoride because that's going to kill me and my bones are going to break and I'm going to fall down and die three decades early. But when it's presented in a way, I mean, this is the thing, is you then, and I'm not saying obviously not with everything. Of course, I think we do
need to question things. I do wouldn't think we need to pay attention to real research, but that's one of the things is and I think there are lots of things that do need to be spoken about, you know, and not behind closed doors, but publicly, even if it's just for debate, and even if it's just for transparency.
And you know, I remember I've spoken to you maybe about this, but I remember doctor Bill for twenty thirty years teaching the food pyramid because I thought that was the best science, you know, and I thought low fat, high sugar, or not high sugar, but low fat was the best because that's the And then it turns out probably not the best. And then but that you learn more or you come to a new understanding or awareness or knowledge or data, and you go, all right, I
got it wrong. So I think there's always that's got to be like, we need to be open, as you said, until we get more research that contradicts our current research. Let's stay with what we actually know rather than what someone thinks. But the truth is, like everyone has an emotional attachment to something, you know, and so when you hear people that are basically evangelizing something which seems in
terms of our current thinking, somewhat counterintuitive. You've got to wonder what that is just objective reality and what is emotion? And what is a sales pitch like you got to and then the general public me in that, I don't know, you're just trying to filter me. I don't know. I'm listening, like I listened to you, and I go well with this. You know infinitely more than me, and I trust you and like you, so I'm in right. But you can do that with other people as well. But maybe they're not.
You know, maybe they even think they're right, but they're not.
Well, that's possible. Confirmation bias is a real thing. You alluded it alluded to that earlier. So these individuals like they glom on to these few studies that look alarming, if you don't do a deeper dive on them, and you don't compare them to the wealth of literature that contradicts them, you can really glom onto that and get sucked down into a vortex of oh my gosh, this fluoride stuff is really horrible. This is this is going
to kill people. When it's panic, it's alarm, and the whole reason they're doing this is so they can get attention, get clicks, get ratings. This is really reckless behavior and no one should be taking medical advice from people who are not doctors or scientists, and that's exactly what they're doing.
And this is what frustrates professionals in my circle so much, because we get up every day, we roll up our sleeves, we're in the lab, we're doing the hard work trying to help people at the end of the day, and then you get these influencers that can just get on a podcast with some yahoo and everyone believes that because they're saying something interesting or framing it in a very scary emotional way, and they're not doing a balanced or honest,
objective analysis of all the data. And like you said, maybe that's an honest mistake because they're sucked into this vortex themselves. But at the end of the day, it's just all such reckless behavior when it comes to public health. And I wish there was some sort of mechanism that could stop it. But with free press, freedom of speech,
you know, I certainly don't want to curtail that. What we need to do is start educating the public or promoting shows like the U Project that actually has scientists, doctors and experts who know what they're talking about to try to set the record straight. So I got to thank you for doing a public service by allowing, you know, some boring scientists like myself to come on the air and tell people what's what.
You're not that boring, You're not that. I mean, you know, we love you, You're great. I mean, for me, it's thank you for saying all that. That's nice and I do I mean what I always say to my audience that you know, I'm going to get stuff wrong. And I've got a lot of things wrong. And I've shared thoughts and ideas that down the track proved to be not the best thought or idea. But I think that all we can do is ask good questions and pay attention to we know versus what we think?
You know?
What is is what is the evidence and what does that mean? But I think one of the challenges quite often with stuff is that you know, like even with one of the studies that I ran that I conducted with my own research, I didn't get it didn't confirm my hypothesis right, It didn't with some of it like there were there were results that and it didn't matter
because it is it is what it is. But I and in the middle of that, I thought, oh, no, wonder people can It would be really quite easy to manipulate this to create an outcome that would suit me better, right, But it didn't with one of them. It just didn't. But yeah, that that being able to For me, it's a blessing to be able to. I mean, if not for this, I wouldn't even know you. I wouldn't have the pleasure of doing this. And I'm not being disingenuous.
I mean, for me, it's just fucking great because I learned so much. But also I also like and I'm not trying to do a sales pitch on you or me or the show, but I love I love the fact that you and I talked for five minutes before we start recording, and it's exactly the same as when we're recording, right, So you and me, like, there's no interview, there's just two blokes talking about stuff that both of
us think. He's pretty interesting. And for me, that's the that's the value of trying to do something like this this way. I was going to say to you back to just quickly the you know, the importance of people having access to water that's not going to kill them. So there's a guy you're probably not a fan of the UFC, but there's a guy who was in the UFC for a long time. He's actually a big sweetheart.
His name's Justin Wren. And speaking of Joe Rogan, he's been on Joe Rogan a bunch, and he went on a he went on a trip to Uganda, and I think he was I can't remember the motivation for him going, but when he was there, he had a bit of an epiphany and a spiritual revolution or awakening or whatever. And he met all of these literally pygmies who live in Uganda, who live in these the worst, harshest, harshest conditions. They didn't have access to clean drinking water. They were
treated terribly by the government and a lot of the population. Anyway, he fell in love with them, and I think probably for the best part of the last ten years, even when he was still fighting. He has created all these programs around medical and health care and education. But one of the things that he's done is they've created thousands of clean wells. Obviously still not with fluoride, but so many of the people were dying, like dying quickly from
water born. I guess is the term diseases like things that were in the war, they like they never had access to clean water ever, right, And yeah, you know that's a phenomenon.
Such a simple thing can make such a huge difference in some of these nations, their entire you know GNP, their gross national product, goes into treating people for dysentery and diarrheal diseases, things that you never hear about over here but do exist.
You know, if we.
Yeah malaria as well, and if we resort to drinking raw water, we would be suffering from some of the same maladies that these people deal with on a day to day basis. Child mortality is through the roof in many of these nations. It's heartbreaking to see, Craig, So I'm really glad to hear of stories like that. They're they're very inspirational, and this is a very cheap and humane thing to do. Just give people clean drinking water. It can make it conceive lives.
I was thinking before when I read the article about fluoride. By the way, I'm just going to give you the names of those articles. Everybody, it's yes, fluoride in your drinking water is a good thing. I don't know if people want to go. If they want to go look at it. They're at my website althor Bill Sullivan dot com. You'll find links to both these articles there, and they're
really good. They're really good. They're a good read. So and you might read it and say, I'd like someone else to read this, so you know, have to read yourself. Go to doctor Bill's site, and then refer it on if you think it's appropriate. I was thinking, you know, because they started I think they introduced fluoride into the water in some parts of the States in the nineteen forties. This is a weird question, and I bet you've know
they may have thought of it. I doubt it, but it addresses one particular health issue, oral hygiene, you know all of that. Is there something else potentially that I know people are like, fuck off, don't put anything in our water. But why did they target that one thing?
Like?
Is there are there any other let's put vitamin C in the water? I mean, you know what I mean. I wonder is there is there any other mineral that could be added? That would be, you know, a preventative strategy for some kind of health condition or like I wonder why it started and ended with fluoride, and I wonder, yeah, I wonder if there's any bigger potential beyond that.
Well, fluoride's a unique case because about one hundred years ago, like I said, correlations were being made in the areas that have high natural fluoride in the environment. The tooth problems that we were seeing in other parts of the country were just non existent. So someone just got the bright idea, well, hey, let's just put a little fluoride in everybody's water and everyone can enjoy this benefit. So that's that's the unique story behind fluoride.
But as to your.
Other point, what about other minerals? You know, people need calcium, magnesium, sodium.
You know those are in tapwater. Though.
This is one of the things that the raw water movement gets wrong. They vilify tapwater, saying that the purification process strips healthy minerals out of the water, and that's just not true at all. Minerals are way too small to be filtered out. They're in your water whether you like it or not, and the mineral content does vary across the country because there's different types of rocks all
around the country. So if you want to have more consistency, or if you think your water is lacking in mineral content for some reason, there are tests you can buy. You can find out exactly what types of minerals are or are not in your water. And if you find any that are lacking, there's even mineral drops you can add to your water to supplement it with minerals. I don't recommend that because water in and of itself is not a great source of minerals. Okay, you get most
of them your diet. I would not obsess over Oh my gosh, my my water probably doesn't have as much magnesium as someone else's.
You're fine.
Just you're going to get most of your magnesium from your diet. It's not something you need to worry about. But this is one of those things that the raw water people latch onto to try to demonize tap water. So they're they're spreading a lot of misinformation and and and just plane you know, I don't know if they're purposefully lying or if they're misguided or what, but it's just not true that minerals are stripped out of your tap water.
I could be wrong on this, but I think I think I mentioned in something relating Tarif Kain in the article, but also in this Joe Rogan conversation that that that fluoride had a detrimental impact on IQ or brain function. Right, let's talk about that. That's a good one. Yeah, yeah, let's what what is? Because that also scared the shit out of me. Then I forgot about it because I'm there,
you go, because I'm a low brain function judo fluoride. Yeah, you must be ingesting too much of it, and so tell us about that.
Yeah, the i Q thing is really interesting and and it certainly is one of the talking points that RFK jr. And the anti fluoride people uh harp on a lot. And that's There was one study that was done in Canada, which puts more fluoride into the water than we do, and it was a very small study, and it showed that pregnant mothers who had more than the usual amount of fluoride, when they did a longitudinal analysis and looked at their children growing up, they had a minor drop
in IQ. Three IQ points was the max. And I think it was only seen in girls for some reason that wasn't seen in boys, but don't quote me on that. I'm not entirely sure about the ins and outs of the studies. It's been a little while since I looked at it, but the difference was extremely modest. The fluoride level is not comparable to what we use in the United States, and studies like this are fraught with confounding variables.
And by that I mean there could be many other explanations why these children appeared to show a minor drop in IQ. So how do we get around those confounding variables. Well, we need other groups to repeat those sorts of studies. I would view that IQ study Craig like I classified it earlier, as a preliminary study. Okay, it's a small study. This is a potentially interesting result. It warrants further investigation. It certainly does not warrant panic about the fluoride in
the water at this point. Okay. So another study just came out last week, another IQ study. I think it was inspired by this preliminary study.
It was a little.
Larger and it showed again a very modest effect, but only in places that are using way too much fluoride. So the headline screamed, once again, much to my chagrin, fluoride lower's IQ. What the headline should have said is that the amount of fluoride that we use in our tapwater has no effect on IQ, because that's what the study showed. When people ingest the levels of fluoride that we use in tapwater, there was absolutely no association with higher or lower IQ.
Wow wow, and these are these are that's that's not sorry, that's not going to sell papers or get bums on seats or get attention, is it. Well?
The authors of the paper even said that, and and they must be really frustrated with how the news agencies frame their research. And this happens to scientists all the time because, like you said, in order to get clicks, in order to get people's attention, you need to make it scary, you need to make it emotional. And if you put out a study that says there's no there's no change in IQ. The study was a bust. What we what we did learn is we can't put too much fluoride in the water and we don't.
Yes, yes, now my listeners are probably thinking how much fluoride is in our order? So I've been doing a little bit of research while also listening. That's how fucking well my brain works because of the fluorid I have. So so the recommendation in this article, doc was point seven milligram per leader of drinking water.
Right, Yes, that's what we're using the stats.
Yeah, so let me just tell you everyone, and we should also say while you brought that up, that most natural levels of fluoride out in the environment exceed that amount.
Right.
Wow, but this is the lowest amount that scientists have found that is absolutely safe, but still confers a dramatic benefit on dental health.
Okay, so in Melbourne where well here we go Australian states and territories, very there, very within the range of point six. So remember doctor Bill said point seven in the states, point six to one point one, So of fluoride per leader, the milligrams per leader, so milligrams per lead, and I think Melbourne it's I just found something that said Melbourne is less than one milligram per la. So it's in the ballpark, so I've done. Yeah, they sound comparable. Yeah, I don't think weed to panic.
Well, I will tell your listeners that if you are ingesting too much fluoride. You will know because your teeth will start to become discolored. Like I said, the fluoride literally binds to your enamel. It's one of the chemical constituents that makes it strong. But you will see if you have excess fluoride a little discoloration in your teeth. There's some studies that suggest that's actually healthy because it helps build even tougher enamel.
But to me, it's an easy.
Way to alert people that there's too much fluoride in your environment. So if your teeth aren't being you know, it's called fluoridosis. If you don't have symptoms of this, people can google it and see what it looks like online. Okay, and if your teeth start looking like that, you should tell the authorities. Hey, there might be too much fluoride in my water.
People. I'm just wondering, can people test their own tapwater at home? Like I'm guessing there must be a test that you could see how much fluoride is in what's coming out of your tap. Not that I think we need to do this or worry about this everyone. This is just a curiosity.
No, there's there's certainly there's tests for all the minerals in your water, you can like buy I don't know the name of it, but you can. I saw one test that tested for multiple minerals all in one shot. Yeah, and for people who there's a lot of homes at least in the US, where they filter the tap water that comes to their home.
Yep.
So if you do that, you actually remove the vast majority of the fluoride along with all the other minerals, because those depending on what sort of filtration device you use in your house. Wow, that could strip the minerals out of the tap water. Tap water itself has minerals. But if you do like reverse osmosis in your home because you don't like to taste the tap water or something like that, that can strip some of the minerals out. Like I said earlier, if you're paranoid about that, which
you shouldn't be. There are people who take advantage of this and sell mineral drops. You know, they scare people in this saying, oh, your water is now depleted of minerals. You should buy my drops and add them back. You can do that if you want. Professionally, I'm telling you it's not necessary. You get all the minerals you need from your diet.
I don't even know what the I should know more about the rationale behind what I'm about to say, but I don't. But a friend of mine who will remain nameless, it's a hey, he he is really really what's toward Let's just go strict concerned about his water and I think he filters it three different ways like he would He will never drink out of a tap, right, And I don't want to say too much, But is that just for taste reasons or no? No, No, it's a health thing. No, it's not about taste at all. It's
he doesn't because he thinks. And really I haven't gone into it with him, and maybe I should just out of curiosity not judgment. But yeah, and he's he really worries quite a bit about the water that he'd like a lot, the water that he drinks.
Well, there are some valid reasons for a concern. You know, there's been a few incidences in the United States where tap water was found to contain a nasty chemical, you know, from an industrial complex that was nearby. We had the whole Flint, Michigan lead crisis. That wasn't a water purification issue, say, but that was bad pipes that they shifted to running it through, and it was just a political failure more than anything else. Yes, But those are those are the
exceptions to the rule, Okay. And so I can understand your friend's concern about tap water and wanting to be extra cautious and filtering it. I myself would probably err more on the side of caution than doing something like raw water. You know, you got these two ends of the spectrum here. Being a little more conservative about the content of your water is I think a little more health conscious. Maybe you're going overboard, but you know, better
safe than sorry in some in some cases. But the thing is that you know he's doing this extra filtration. He's probably doing it because of some of the stories that have been linking tap water to an occasional breach of either a pathogen or an industrial pollutant or something like lead. Again, those are rare cases. I don't lose sleep over them, but they have happened, and they are real.
The other thing that people should keep in mind to balance this out, is that at least in the States, our EPA screens for nearly one hundred chemical contaminants, including lead in the tapwater and they routinely do this, so if something comes up, they're going to alert the public not to drink their tapwater to the situation gets resolved. So we have these health checks in place. Australia probably
has a very similar system. And just this year, the Biden administration included another component that the EPA needs to start screening for, and that's the pfas, one of these forever chemicals, and I was thrilled to read that. That's a fantastic addition that the EPA should be screening our tapwater for.
I don't know if this is the right question, but what are the most common microbial contaminants? Is that the right word that we might that might show up in raw water.
Raw water is filled with a myriad of different pathogens that you could potentially acquire, and mostly all of them are going to give you the nastiest stomach infection you've ever had in your life. So I'll break them down into the different types. The main viruses you can get from raw water would include neurovirus, the one that's famous on cruise ships. You know that rips through cruise ships and forces them to dock early. But neurovirus is found
pretty much anywhere and rotavirus. Now, both of them will give you nasty, short lived diarrheal infections and they spread like wildfire. So this is one of the underappreciated things about drinking. People who drink raw water, they might think, oh, well, i'll get sick, I'll deal with it. While you're sick, you can commune that disease to another innocent person. And that's what gets me a little angry. This is a public health thing. You're being very selfish, you're that kind
of mentality, you know. But another virus can be in the water that causes hepatitis A, and nobody wants a liver infection. The bacteria would be fecal bacteria lovely to talk about, right e coli sound mella. This means that somewhere along the way, literally shit got into the water and that's what you're drinking. And this can be human shit, it can be from animals. It's just disgusting.
Why would you want to do this.
Tap water screens those pathogens out, kills them with chlorine. So those are the bacterial infections, and then we get into my favorite Craig parasites. Okay, we have cryptosporidium, We have cyclospora, we have toxoplasma, which we've talked about on your show a number of times.
We have Can you get that through cats as well? Cats? Rain?
That's right, well, not cat, we just catsis ca seces comes out in their feces. So with a lot of feral cats roaming around some of these natural sources of water, you know the cat shit's going to get into the water at some point. And a storm can make this even worse because it makes all the shit in the soil run into the water. Okay, and then you get
all these bacteria, all these parasites, all these viruses. Like I said in the article, it's aquatic Russian rule at and you don't really know which one of these you ingested that upsets your stomach. But some of these, you know, a lot of these people will say, okay, well I'll get I'll get the runs for a few days and then I'll get better. One you can spread that to other innocent people. If you're very young or very old,
or compromise, these things can literally kill you. And that's not only in the drinkers of the raw water, but the people you might spread it to. So This is just an inconceivably stupid thing to do. And like I said before, it's just kind of slap in the face to the nations who don't enjoy the privilege of having safe water to drink on a daily basis.
I'll tell you what, a lot of animals must have a very robust, bloody constitution. Because some think about where most animals drink from and what they drink and what they would be ingesting.
Yeah, well there's a couple. There's a couple. That's a good point. There's a couple things to consider when you raise that issue. First of all, wild animals are riddled with parasites. Okay, many of them die from these parasites. How many of them are sick because of it. So it's interesting to contemplate that, you know, wildlife must be okay, right, No,
they're not. You go out there and pick up a random squirrel, beaver, you cut it open, you're going to find plenty of parasites, and that animal may live a very short life. You know, you're not doing a study on its quality of life. The other thing that people fail to consider is that there are co evolutionary relationships with wildlife and the pathogens in water. They may have
developed some degree of tolerance to some of those infections. Okay, they have a completely different microbiome than what we have, for example, and they may be able to fight some of these infections better or minimize them. But if you talk to most people who study wildlife, you pick any animal out there, it's going to be riddled with parasites and germs.
That's why we have to.
Cook our food, right, we have to cook our meat or else we're going to get those germs too.
One which is a left turn. It still involves water, but it's unrelated to either of the articles. And I don't know if you're going to be more informed than me, I suggest you would be. So there's been there's been quite a bit of conversation around drinking water out of plastic bottles because the plastic has chemicals that leach into
the water. Thalates one of them. I don't know what a fucking thalate is, doc, but I hear them talking about thalates all the time, and apparently plays havoc with testosterone levels and the endocrime system and not just men but women, And so I know next to nothing about it. But can you talk to us do I need to drink? Do I need to have my water at the gym in a glass bottle or a metal bottle or a container like this one that I have. Oh, you can't see because my camera. Like I drink out of like
insulate metal. I don't really drink cataplastic bottles. But in general, can you help us that?
Yeah, excellent question, and this is one that I would
classify under ongoing research. Okay, there's been some preliminary studies that do suggest some of the chemical components in plastic water bottles, especially the older ones that have been made with the endocrine disruptor that you mentioned BPA, There's been some studies, mostly in rodent models, that suggest that they can interfere with hormone levels, and especially in children, this might be a very dangerous thing because they're still developing.
BPA has been removed from a lot of plastic water bottles in recent times because of these studies. You just don't want to take chances on it, and I think that's a smart move. But who knows what else might be in those plastic water bottles. Plastic is generally not a natural substance. You know, it's got a lot of man made chemicals, and we aren't entirely sure what they
might do to the human body. And we also don't know for sure again doses everything, how much of this actually leaches into the water, how much of it actually remains in the body and causes the problem. I'd frankly be a little more worried about the microplastics issue. We've already been seeing a lot of microplastics in wildlife, out in the environment and in people as well, and we
don't fully know what the consequences of that are. But I'm venturing the guests they might not be all that great, So for the time being, I know, if you're looking for my personal recommendation, I try to stay away from any plastic water bottle that has BPA or other endocrine disruptors in it. These would be older ones. Newer ones probably don't have those materials. Now that said, I would go one step further and just use a glass or steel water bottle like you showed on your They can't
see your screen, but you use a steel water bottle. Yeah, use that. Use glass. There's no question about the safety of those in my mind.
Yeah, But the.
Plastic ones, I think it's I think the research is ongoing.
Another thing, and this is I'm not asking a question, just throwing it out there. I think I also worry about, not for a myriad of reasons, but one microwaving food. Maybe we can talk about that one day, I don't know, but also microwaving food in plastic. So you're putting food in a plastic Let's say you got some takeaway food from the whatever the tie join or the Chinese join or the Italian joint, it doesn't matter what it was.
And now you know it's day two, and you take the leftovers out of the fridge and then you zap it in the microwave, and now you've got one or two day old food being microwaved in plastic. And that intersection of hot food plastic. I worry about that as well. I don't do that, but I worry about people doing that.
I don't do that myself either. M I mean to be honest with you, I have not looked at the studies that say whether it's safe or not. But in my mind, it's just something that I don't need to do, so why would I do it. It's very easy to put it onto a ceramic plate or you know, other other dish and just or put it on the stovetop.
You know, it's not a big deal.
By the way, I want to show you my this is what I drink my water out.
Wow. Wow, the Bill's got a skull glass. That's terror glass. That is that is significant too. That looks like come, it's not taste, badass man? Look at that is that looks like a lad that looks me? Or what?
Yeah?
That's you. You're You're a weapon. Dude. You're terrifying. When I think of terrifying, I don't think of you. But yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, But that's okay, that's okay. We don't need to be scaring people. Hey, how do people find you? Follow you, connect with you? And also access those articles again?
Right, the articles that we were talking about today were published in Self magazine. Shout out to the reporters who contacted me to get that information. You can find the links on my website, author Bill Sullivan dot com, along with a whole bunch of other stuff and all the other episodes of the You project that I've done with Craigor there too.
Awesome, Michael saygobye affair. But I always appreciate you and good luck with the ensuing mayhem that is four years of Donald Trump. Betton down the hatches. Thanks man, I'm going to need it. Thanks Bro,