Shopping for Freedom: Escaping the Cult of Consumerism
United Natures Media (2019)
Film Review
Shopping for Freedom is best described as an illustrated podcast about the legacy of Edward Bernays, the father of the public relations industry. It’s intended to remind us of the subtle way public relations and propaganda influence our culture to the point we only imagine we have free choice in the items we purchase.
The film has no background narrative. The sound track is a casual conversation between the hosts of Ashes Ashes, a podcast about the “end of the world.” Meanwhile we are bombarded with priceless archival footage of early TV ads and the propaganda news reels shown in schools and movie theaters in the fifties and sixties.
The footage begins with the propaganda films Bernays produced in the early fifties to win popular support for the CIA-backed coup to overthrow Guatemala’s elected government – at the behest of United Fruit Company (to protect its monopoly control of the banana industry)
The film goes on to describe Bernays’ work under Woodrow Wilson promoting US entry into World War I, and the new science of psychological persuasion as described in the former’s 1928 book Propaganda.
The hosts go on to give illustrated examples of Bernays’ successful campaigns – to increase smoking among women and consumption of nutritionless breakfast cereals and to shame working class women who got married without diamond engagement rings or wore the same dress more than once a week.*
Intriguingly the filmmakers also insert several one second “subliminal” messages inserted into the video, which the hosts never comment on. I saw “You are enough” flashed twice, three one-second Coke ads, and “eco-capitalism” flashed once.
The film concludes by recommending viewers question all their choices. Most people claim not to be influenced by advertising. In most cases, however, many of us are unaware of habits (such as buying diamond engagement rings) the PR industry has elevated into cultural norms. In all their decisions, people need to ask themselves, “Is someone trying to sell me something?”
*Bernays was also hired by ALCOA in the mid-forties to run a campaign to dispose of toxic fluoride waste by persuading municipalities to add it to their public water systems. See Edward Bernays: Father of Water Fluoridation
My Oral Submission to the Health Select Committee on the Health (Fluoridation of Drinking Water) Amendment Bill. If passed, this bill would introduce mandatory water fluoridation throughout New Zealand. At present, decisions are on the local level and only 27 out of 67 local councils fluoridate their water. With the current ban in most of western Europe against water fluoridation, the current trend is for local authorities to remove fluoride from their water.
Only 11 countries in the world have more than 50% of their population drinking fluoridated water: Australia, Brunei, Chile, Guyana, Hong Kong, the Irish Republic, Israel, Malaysia, Singapore, the United States and New Zealand
SUBMISSION
I speak in opposition to this bill.
I am a retired Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist certified by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology. I have 33 years clinical experience post-training – eight of them for the New Zealand Health Service. I have a subspecialty in child development.
Before moving to New Zealand in 2002, I was also on the clinical faculty at the University of Washington Medical School for over 15 years. As part of this role, I was expected to keep abreast of the medical literature and to demonstrate an ability to apprise scientific studies for their reliability and validity. This was not only in the field of psychiatry, but in the field of genetics, metabolism, neurobiolgy and endocrinology – owing to their major impact on psychological functioning.
The Scandal in US Public Health Research
Based on this background, I wish to alert the select committee to the current scandal in the US in the area of public health research. The scandal largely relates to flawed nutrition research resulting in decades of recommendations by the public health community for people to eat low fat, low salt, high carbohydrate diets. The tragic effect of these recommendations – without a shred of valid or reliable research evidence – is a global epidemic of obesity, diabetes, heart disease and tooth decay.
Much of the research supporting water fluoridation is of a similar vein. The studies typically have a very small effect size, lack vital design features that eliminate observer bias and confuse statistical association with causality. There isn’t a single double blind randomly controlled trial showing that water fluoridation is either safe or effective in preventing tooth decay. Likewise there are no observational studies – where populations are followed over 20-30 years to ascertain the long term effect of drinking fluoridated water.
Fluoride is a Neurodevelopmental Toxin Like Lead and Mercury
In contrast, there are extensive studies suggesting that fluoride – even in the low doses used in water fluoridation is a neurodevelopmental toxin – ie that it has toxic effects on the fetus and in young children as their brains are developing. A 2014 peer-reviewed article about the pandemic of neurodevelopmental toxicity in The Lancet, one of the world’s preeminent medical journals specifically lists fluoride as as one of 12 common neurodevelopmental toxins – along with lead, mercury and PCBs. Fluoride has been identified as a potential neurotoxin largely on the basis of over 100 human studies and even more animal studies indicating that it causes cognitive damage and a range of long term behavioral and psychological problems through continuous exposure during pregnancy and early childhood.
One of the points emphasized in The Lancet is that substances that cause neurodevelopmental toxicity do so at very low doses – doses that are much, much smaller than the doses that cause acute poisoning. For many years the public health community reassured us that a low dose of lead and mercury poisoning caused no harm to human health – a position that has been reversed (after causing significant permanent disability for hundreds of thousands of children) after decades of careful research.
Now public health advocates are trying to convince us that low doses of fluoride are perfectly safe and based on past history I think the public has good reason to be skeptical.
No Research Evidence on Maximum Safe Dose
The problem with this approach – and the main argument that has caused all western European countries except Britain and Ireland to ban water fluoridation – is that there has been absolutely no research to determine what the maximum safe fluoride dose is, especially in vulnerable populations, such as those with kidney failure or infants whose ONLY food intake is formula prepared with fluoridated water.
All existing research focuses on the concentration of fluoride in drinking water, with recommendations ranging between 0.7 to 1.0 parts per million. The problem with focusing on concentration is the daily dose individuals receives varies greatly depending on how much tap water they drink, whether they concentrate it via cooking and other sources of fluoride in the diet. Tea is a major source of fluoride and Kiwis are great tea drinkers – which means they consume substantial additional fluoride in this way.
The prevailing sentiment in Europe is that when governments claim low doses of fluoride are safe, they have an absolute obligation to produce research evidence demonstrating the dosage at which daily exposure becomes unsafe before they force an entire population to consume it daily in their tap water.
This is also the main argument that persuaded New Plymouth District Council to remove the fluoride from our water in 2011 – like hundreds of local authorities in other English speaking countries that still fluoridate water. The New Zealand government most definitely has the same obligation to the New Zealand people.
In Fluoride Deception, BBC journalist Christopher Bryson describes how the decision to deliberately dose US municipal water supplies with a potent industrial toxin was basically a corporate scam dreamed up by Alcoa, GM and Dupont, with the help of Edward Bernays, the infamous father of the public relations industry. Their cynical goal was to stem a tide of lawsuits related to death and injuries from toxic fluoride pollution – by convincing the public that fluoride is good for you.
Fluoride is an extremely toxic pollutant produced by aluminum smelting. GM and Dupont became involved with the scheme because GM held the patent on fluoride-based Freon and Dupon manufactured it. Freon was a common refrigerant which the EPA banned in 2010.
According to Bryson, the FDA first raised the alarm about fluoride toxicity in the early thirties, resulting in scores of lawsuits for aluminum workers crippled and killed from fluoride poisoning and farmers near aluminum plants, whose livestock were killed due to fluoride poisoning.
Public Relations: Cheaper than Pollution Controls
Rather than encouraging Alcoa to institute pollution controls, an Alcoa researcher named Francis Frary decided a better approach was to alter public perception of fluoride. He approached Mellon Institute researcher Gerald Cox. In 1937, Cox performed a single study in rats (who rarely suffer tooth decay to begin with) in 1937 and “proved” fluoride strengthened their teeth.
Frary and Cox were soon joined in their little scheme by Charles Kettering’s GM’s research director and Freon magnate, who approached the American Dental Association, began funding many of their activities. He also got himself appointed to their three member Advisory Committee on Research in Dental Caries. Meanwhile GM and Dupont hired scientist Robert Kehoe to perform safety studies on both fluoride and tetra ethyl lead, a gasoline additive co-manufactured by the two companies. Unsurprisingly, Kehoe declared both leaded gasoline and fluoride safe at “low levels.”
Enter the Father of Public Relations
The most prominent villain in this sordid history was Edwards Bernays, the father of public relations industry. At the beginning, there was massive public opposition to water fluoridation, led mainly by doctors who were well aware of fluoride’s toxicity. Bernays’ answer was to enlist even more prominent doctors to declare it safe, starting with prominent baby doctor Benjamin Spock.
The common perception of a potent toxin such as fluoride being safe and good for teeth is based on decades of corporations paying researchers to produce the scientific results they want – and burying research and firing and blacklisting scientists whose studies show otherwise.
Bryson details numerous deliberate smear campaigns against extremely reputable doctors and scientists who dared to publish research regarding the adverse effects of water fluoridation:
Dr. George Waldbott a world famous doctor who first identified penicillin allergy and the link between smoking and emphysema. Waldbott published numerous double blind studies in the fifties showing that fluoride is harmful to human health. The result was a massive corporate smear campaign that destroyed his reputation by marginalizing and demonizing him.
Dr William Marcus – a senior EPA toxicologist in the Office of Water, fired in 1992 for attempting to publicize studies showing that fluoride causes bone and liver cancer. In 1994 Marcus won lawsuit against the federal government and was reinstated. While the EPA still refuses to ban water fluoridation, the unions representing EPA scientists have called for a moratorium.
Dr Phyllis Mullinix – research toxicologist hired by Forsyth Dental Institute to study the effect of fluoride on the brain. Mullinex was first fired and then blacklisted in the mid-nineties when she published research showing fluoride produces memory and behavior problems in children.
Where Fluoride Comes From
Although fluoride is added to municipal water supplies as a “drug” – that allegedly improves dental health – it has never been approved by the FDA. In fact most communities source their fluoride from the phosphate fertilizer industry, as hydrofluorosilicic acid. This is an extremely toxic, hazardous waste, and the EPA requires phosphate manufacturers to capture it via “wet scrubbers” in their chimneys (to prevent toxic fluoride gas from being released into the air). The resulting liquid is then loaded, unpurified, into tanker trucks and sold to cities to be added to their public water supply. In addition to fluoride, it also contains a number of heavy metals and radionucleotides (radioactive elements – mainly uranium-238, uranium-234, thorium-230, radium-226, radon-222, lead-210, and polonium-210).
*2014 update
In 2003 the EPA commissioned the National Research Council (part of the National Academy of Sciences) to examine all the peer reviewed research to make a determination whether an upper limit of 8 mg of fluoride (eight glasses of water with a fluoride concentration of 4 mg/liter) was still within the margin of safety. In 2006 the NRC came back with the recommendation that 8 mg (4 mg/liter) was definitely too high – as many Americans were experiencing symptoms of chronic fluoride poisoning at this dose.
In addition to lower IQ in children, the NRC found that water flouridation was contributing to an epidemic of hypothyroidism, infertility, arthritis and hip fracture.
Based on the high probability that Americans drinking fluoridated water were suffering serious and irreversible health damage, the NRC urgently recommended that the EPA ban water fluoridation until the safe threshold (based on urine fluoride measurements) could be determined.
The Bush administration and corporate media buried the report.
98% of European municipalities have banned water fluoridation.
In 2011, I was part of a local citizen’s groups that persuaded New Plymouth District Council to remove the fluoride from our water. We had major support from New Zealand’s Fluoride Action Network and internationally renowned biochemist Dr Paul Connett.
Below a presentation by Dr Connett to Toronto anti-fluoride activists:
The Most Revolutionary Act 