Should I Shut the Heck Up About All Things Not Green Smoothie? (Part 6 of 7)

About Dr. L telling me I should not talk about toxic dental practices and stick to whole foods topics only?

That is precisely the reason I have a blog in the first place.

I don’t want my readers to be as ignorant as I was when I was 27 years old and allowing doctors to tell me to feed my little boy spoonfuls of liquid steroids. I had dentists wanting to fill holes in his teeth with mercury as he got older (luckily, I never allowed that in any of my children). I’m livid that a dentist sent me home with little blue fluoride pills to feed my baby, not giving me the very real “other side” to the recommendation to have him eat sodium fluoride!

(Fortunately, in the case of the little blue pills, they sat there and expired during the two years after filling the prescription—I felt guilty every time I saw them, but I could not make myself feed them to my little boy. And fortunately, I knew enough that no child of mine has ever had an amalgam filling.)

I don’t have any interest in denigrating any profession.  Certainly not dentists. I have had email correspondences with Dr. L since he attended a class I taught two years ago, and I know him to be a thoughtful, purposeful, open-minded vegetarian athlete who influences his patients for good.

However, I hope more dentists self-educate to offer other options and educate their patients against toxic practices. I’m sure it would be scary to have many practices that underpin your livelihood called into question—dentists carry debt on expensive equipment to perform these procedures and use these materials. But I’m not the researchers who have documented valid, massive concerns for the public health. I’m just one person waving a red flag towards it.

But I’m fierce that since I am blessed with an audience, I hope for my readers to start YOUNGER THAN I DID—or at any point!—with knowledge about controversies regarding their health. That way they won’t unwittingly allow unnecessary root canals in their mouth, as I did.

I hope my readers learn to QUESTION AUTHORITY. I don’t mean REJECT all authority across the board. I mean make your own decisions, do your own thinking, use your intuition. Study an issue well before doing something like fossilizing a dead tooth, or feeding your baby little blue pills of a known poison, or injecting your child with, well, anything. Expect that major industries—all of them—have an agenda. That agenda is often in conflict with the public health.

Don’t believe everything you read on the internet. Learn to be a savvy consumer of information so you know what’s more likely to be true, and less likely. (In the intro to 12 Steps to Whole Foods, I write about evaluating research.)

I will not go silent on subjects where I think we are asleep at the wheel.

I may not be an “expert,” as Dr. L wanted me to know. But I am a HUGE FAN of parents becoming educated about the chemicals they feed their little ones. We should become layperson experts as much as possible—these issues have massive implications.

And while I believe dentists are good people trying to help us (Dr. L states that I am criticizing dentists), they do not always understand the implications of our drinking and eating synthetic fluoride.

If that’s the criticism—that I shouldn’t blog about dental issues because I’m not qualified—well, then, I’m not an expert on whole foods either. He didn’t like the quotes I used by a chemist, and he dismissed an entire book on the fluoride travesty by a journalist, because the journalist wrote a book for money so clearly he fabricated a fake controversy.

Adding fluoride to water is forced medication, and it’s not a fake controversy. It’s a real controversy for good reasons. Even if I accept Dr. L’s belief that children have fewer cavities if they drink fluoride or take fluoride pills, he offers no evidence that it’s safe for other organs and systems, to ingest it regularly. That’s because there IS no evidence of its safety. There is plenty of cause for concern and many studies documenting how dangerous it is.

If you feel that my blog should be limited to non-controversial topics related to whole foods only, perhaps you can just skip any posts on other topics? I’m a renegade, and this is a counter-culture blog. It just is.

If I’m blogging 5 times a week, for nearly 5 years now, I don’t want to have limitations like that. I want to talk about what’s on my mind. Eating whole foods and giving the Standard American Diet the boot will always be my favorite topic, though, so come back soon for more on that!

Tomorrow, I will post some interesting comments from a dentist who wrote in with her opinion on my comments on amalgam fillings and root canals.

(To access the other posts in this series, Click Here.)

Posted in: Dental Health