Chris Neurath details his work uncovering documents that show how the sugar industry manipulated science and worked secretly behind the scenes to support community fluoridation programmes despite evidence of fluoride’s neurotoxicity and links to other serious health impacts.
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Chris Neurath is the Research Director at Fluoride Action Network (“FAN”) and American Environmental Health Studies Project (“AEHSP”). He evaluates scientific evidence; interprets it for non-specialist and lay audiences; conducts research; and, produces scientific reports for publication in peer-reviewed journals, submission to government agencies and testimony in public hearings.
On 24 November, Neurath was interviewed by Doug and Patti Wood, hosts of the American radio show Green Street, on how the sugar industry has spent years downplaying the health impacts of sugar and promoting the use of fluoride in public water supplies.
The following is an email sent out by FAN to its subscribers to introduce the show.
New Interview: How Industry Distorted Science to Promote Fluoridation
By Fluoride Action Network (also known as Fluoride Alert)
This past September, the Fluoride Action Network (“FAN”) unveiled a new study published in the journal Environmental Health written by our very own Science Director, Chris Neurath. The article uncovers internal industry documents revealing the distorted science and marketing campaigns paid for by the sugar and allied food industries to convince the public and government institutions that everyone could consume unlimited sugary foods and beverages without fear of tooth decay as long as they had access to the “magic bullet” that was fluoridation.
Read FAN’s Original Bulletin on the Study
Neurath’s article garnered coverage from a number of outlets, including an article by The New Lede -a trusted source for reporting on environmental and public health stories – entitled, ‘How Big Sugar Pushed Fluoride’. His article also caught the attention of Dr. Bruce Lanphear, MD, MPH, who is well known for his research on the effects of environmental toxins on brain development, in particularly the neurotoxicity of lead and fluoride. Dr. Lanphear recently wrote two fantastic “must read” pieces citing Neurath’s work:
- The Sugar Experiment: How the Sugar Industry Used Fluoridation as a Smokescreen
- Sweet Deception: How the Kellogg Foundation Helped Turn a Dietary Crisis into a Chemical Solution
FAN’s Neurath was also recently interviewed by Doug and Patti Wood on the environmental health radio show called Green Street. This show was not only recorded as a podcast, but also aired on radio stations across the country [USA]. In the 20-minute interview, he provides an overview of his findings and explains how the military-industrial complex, as well as the aluminium, fertiliser and sugar industries, manipulated and corrupted science to promote the practice of fluoridation, and how the tobacco industry learned from and copied this strategy for their own gain. Click below to listen:
If the above is removed from YouTube, you can listen to it on KPFA HERE. The following are some highlights from the interview.
Table of Contents
How It All Began
Sugar isn’t good for you, but it is a very profitable business. Last year alone, the industry earned US$40 billion. With this much money at stake, the sugar industry has been playing down sugar’s harms and promoting ideas that are not based on scientific facts.
Sugar consumption is a major risk factor for type 2 diabetes, significantly increases the risk of heart disease and stroke, is associated with fatty liver disease, can accelerate cognitive decline and increase the risk of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, is linked to an increased risk of kidney disease, may increase your risk of developing certain cancers, can worsen menopause symptoms and, of course, contributes to tooth decay. But it is sugar’s connection to tooth decay that has been the most difficult harm for the industry to deny.
Related:
- 12 Ways Too Much Sugar Harms Your Body, WebMD, 17 February 2025
- 11 Reasons Why Too Much Sugar Is Bad for You, Healthline, 27 November 2024
Chris Neurath’s paper, published in the journal Environmental Health in September, examined records dating as far back as the 1930s and shows evidence that the sugar industry used manipulation tactics to downplay sugar’s health harms and promote fluoride as a safe solution for tooth decay.
The reason why many have not heard about the fluoride-sugar scandal is that “nobody had really looked into the sugar industry with the recently available documents,” Neurath said.
The “recently available documents” Neurath was referring to were internal documents from sugar and dental organisations that only became publicly available about 10 years ago. “Cristin Kearns, a dentist, [ ] got suspicious when she went to a meeting, and they were talking about diabetes, and the kidney people were saying sugar’s not a problem with diabetes. And she couldn’t believe it,” Neurath said.
So, she started to research and dug up records from the sugar industries and published a paper based on the documents she had found. These documents – which included 1,551 pages of correspondence, meeting minutes and reports from 1959 to 1971 – were found in a public archive at the University of Illinois, part of the personal papers of Roger Adams, a professor emeritus of organic chemistry who served on the advisory boards of the Sugar Research Foundation and the International Sugar Research Foundation.
Related:
- Sugar Papers reveal industry role in 1970s dental programme, University of California, 10 March 2015
- Cristin E. Kearns et al. Sugar Industry Influence on the Scientific Agenda of the National Institute of Dental Research’s 1971 National Caries Program: A Historical Analysis of Internal Documents. 10 March 2015. PLOS Medicine.
Kearns’ paper “showed how the sugar industry had deflected from the role that sugar plays in heart disease and intentionally pushed the narrative that it’s cholesterol and dietary fat, which took hold and only very recently is it being acknowledged that sugar does play a role [in heart disease],” Neurath explained.
This sparked an interest in Neurath regarding the connection between the sugar industry and fluoridation. “People have always been suspicious that the sugar industry may have played a role in promoting fluoridation,” he said. His research showed that the sugar industry had indeed played a role in promoting fluoridation.
And, “the evidence shows it was intentional. The strongest evidence comes from letters and memos and internal documents of what’s called the Sugar Research Foundation, which was started in 1942, [when] fluoridation had not started yet.”
“The most incriminating documents are between the Science Director – his name was Robert Hockett, he was a chemist from MIT – and their PR person, and actually several PR people,” Neurath added.
About 10 years later, these same Sugar Research Foundation public relations (“PR”) staff led the cigarette industry’s campaign to defend themselves against the link between smoking and lung cancer. Along the same lines as the Sugar Research Foundation, the tobacco industry started a Tobacco Research Industry Committee and hired Robert Hockett to be their Assistant Science Director. Hockett stayed with the Tobacco Research Industry Committee for 30 years, Neurath said.
How did the Sugar Research Foundation get into the business of promoting fluoridation?
Fice Mork, a public relations counsel for the Sugar Research Foundation and a key assistant to Hockett, had previously been a public relations consultant for the American Dental Society. And his father was a prominent dentist in New York City.
In 1944/1945, Mork wrote a letter to Hockett stating that the sugar-tooth decay problem had been debated at length, admitting that it had been the trickiest aspect of sugar harms because everybody knew that sugar causes cavities. Finally, Mork said to Hockett, “We’ve got the right angle, we’ve got the right message, fluorine is it,” Neurath explained. Soon after this letter saying “fluorine is it,” they started their campaign.
“Fice Mork organised a symposium in New York City that was attended by 1,000 people, mostly dentists, about fluoridation,” Neurath said. “He got all the top dental people who were, at that point, starting to talk about fluoride and fluoridation as a possibility, and who would go on to be the main promoters of fluoridation for the next several decades.”
“The Sugar Research Foundation paid for this symposium, but that was never mentioned – nobody knew it was the Sugar Research Foundation that was funding this symposium. Furthermore, it was put on by the New York State oral pathology group that [Mork’s] father was a prominent member of.”
The symposium proceedings, basically a transcript of each of the presentations, were published in a book and sent for free to 100,000 dentists and public health officials throughout the United States. Again, there was no mention that this was funded by the sugar industry.
It’s Not Just the Sugar Industry
Christopher Bryson was an investigative journalist who began finding documents about industries such as the aluminium, chemical, phosphate, fertiliser and steel industries whose factories were “spewing out fluoride” as a waste product and it was harming people, crops and livestock, Neurath said.
He wrote the book ‘The Fluoride Deception’, which examines the controversial history behind water fluoridation in the United States. Bryson argues that the campaign to add fluoride to public drinking water was not primarily a public health initiative, but rather a public relations effort driven by industrial and military interests, particularly those tied to the Manhattan Project and Cold War-era nuclear weapons programmes. His research reveals how fluoride, a toxic byproduct of aluminium and phosphate fertiliser industries, was rebranded as a dental health aid despite evidence of its potential harm.
Although fluoride pollution was around in the early 1900s, it became a real problem in the 1940s. “[During] World War II, the aluminium industry took off, they were making aeroplanes like crazy, and they were making aluminium like crazy,” Neurath explained.
“And then the other thing that happened in World War II was the Manhattan Project … A key ingredient, a necessary ingredient, was fluoride. Because to enrich Uranium, one of the primary ways of doing it is using Uranium hexafluoride gas … And that was what the Manhattan Project was doing, and they were using incredible amounts of fluoride. They had tens of thousands of people there, including Harold Hodge who was the chief toxicologist for the Manhattan Project.”
Hodge’s role was to determine the fluoride toxicity risk for people working on the Manhattan Project and so he was experimenting to try to find out the safe levels of exposure. While conducting these experiments, he started discovering evidence of neurotoxicity.
“Back in the 1940s, the lead toxicologist who was focused on studying the toxicity of fluoride had, at least, suspicions based on some evidence that it was neurotoxic,” Neurath said. “We are now 80 years later, and neurotoxicity is now the big current concern.”
How does this all connect to the sugar industry?
In 1945/1946, a meeting was held, which showed farmers were filing lawsuits about fluoride contamination from the Manhattan Project. Hodge and the head of the Manhattan Project, Lieutenant General Leslie Groves, attended this meeting.
These lawsuits were a problem because “the atomic arms race was just getting started,” Neurath said. “And they knew they were going to be polluting even more with fluoride [and] they didn’t want to have any restrictions … so they wanted to find a way to tack down this idea that fluoride was harming people and crops.”
“Harold Hodge pipes up in this meeting and says, ‘You know, if we promoted this idea that fluoridation prevents tooth decay, that could be a good way to – and this in lines of the PR aspect to sell it to the public – and he suggested it, and he went on and did that,” Neurath said. In other words, he promoted fluoride as a way to prevent tooth decay to cover up the harms of fluoride pollution from the Manhattan Project.
A few months before the Sugar Research Foundation held its symposium on fluoride, the Manhattan Project sponsored an almost identical symposium in New York City. “But [the Manhattan Project] invited all the industry people who were having concerns about the fluoride pollution,” Neurath said. “They never told them it was being sponsored by the Manhattan Project. The front group [for the symposium] was the US Public Health Service.”
The Manhattan Project-sponsored symposium aimed to set the limits of safe levels of fluoride exposure. “At the end [of the symposium] they had a little committee meeting of their own people, and they set an interim [limit] which is what the Manhattan Project used,” Neurath explained. “And they were consciously saying, ‘We’ve got to make this so we can still do the work that has to be done, we can’t set this so protective that it shuts down our operations or costs us too much time or money’.”
Neurath believes the sugar industry played the most important role in the beginning of the fluoridation agenda. Although he thinks fluoridation might have happened anyhow, without the sugar industry pushing for it, as “dentists loved the idea that there was something that was a magic bullet.”
“But the sugar industry is still promoting, [actually] these days more defending fluoridation.”
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