Transcript:
I’m so thrilled to have you today for this second episode of the Migraine Alchemy podcast. I have a lot to share today and what I’m going to cover today is going to be ranging from my own personal story of healing and the role that a few very critical minerals played in my health or lack thereof, how I got sick and poisoned by fluoride, and the relationship that fluoride has to a few other key minerals like copper and iodine. I’m going to be talking about thyroid health and how and why migraine is a downstream effect and symptom of hypothyroidism caused by fluoride toxicity and iodine deficiency. It’s taken me a long time to figure this out and I’m going to share not only my personal story of how I figured this out and how I healed myself, but give you some clues and insights about how you can avoid these toxic halides in your environment and prevent your migraines from getting worse, and also why a hair tissue mineral analysis lab, which is the main lab that I use in my coaching practice with minerals for migraines, why that’s so critical even though the HTMA lab does not show the presence of iodine or fluoride or these other toxic halides. You still need that lab in order to determine how supplementing with iodine will affect other minerals that iodine is in relationship with.
So I’ll be sharing a lot about why fluoride is such a huge problem, all the myriad ways that it affects us negatively, why we need to be very diligent about getting this out of our food, medications, bath and body products, and really also look into some of the sociology as to why fluoride is such a mineral and why there are still questions about why this is safe to put in water, the politics around that. I trust you’ll find this insightful. I’m really happy to be able to share this information right at the beginning of this podcast because it’s taken me a long time to connect all these dots and figure this stuff out.
So I hope that this is beneficial to you. This is my second podcast. I’ve really just kind of thrown myself into having a podcast. You’ll notice that the last podcast was kind of more stream of consciousness and a little less structured. I did get some feedback from my mom, especially that it seemed a little unstructured. And sometimes when I just allow myself to kind of freestyle, the flow of information is more organic and free-flowing than if I have an outline. But today I’m going to shoot for a little more structure as I share this information. And thank you so much for listening to the Migraine Alchemy podcast and spreading the word if you know anyone who has migraines or will benefit from this. Enjoy the show.
So I want to start by sharing my story of healing chronic migraine and actually even back up to the point, many points in my life that I believe made me more susceptible to migraine, even before I developed a migraine. So I’m going to be going back pretty far in my personal history. And you know, I’ve been talking for the past few years about my own journey of healing migraine. And it’s really actually, to be honest, a topic I’m getting a little bored with, especially because I don’t have migraines anymore. So it’s a funny situation I’m in where I think about other people’s headaches in my job, and I no longer have headaches. And I talk a lot about my history of getting sick and getting well. And I think it’s a really good sign that I’m bored and tired of talking about my history of migraines, because it really shows that I’ve healed and that my identity is no longer wrapped around being someone with migraines, obviously. But I will say what does not bore me, and which is one reason why I still love sharing the information that I learned in this incredible process of transformation, what does not bore me is starting to really spread the word about how environmental toxins and also a lot of the products, including medical products in our society that are widespread, how those are making us sick, and spread the good news that it is possible to find solutions to diseases as serious and mysterious and chronic as migraine. And it’s absolutely possible to heal, but it’s very difficult to do so without understanding mineral dynamics.
And minerals are so important. I love sharing about them. I love sharing my personal journey and sounding the alarm about some of the problematic minerals in our environment that are not just heavy metals, but things like fluoride that a lot of people either don’t think are a problem or that are considered very controversial minerals as to whether they’re safe or not.
So let’s just start off with my own personal relationship with fluoride. It’s interesting that I actually grew up in an intentional community in southwestern New Mexico with natural hot springs. Now these hot springs, like many mineral springs, are very high in certain minerals and throughout the ages people came and bathed in the hot springs. The land that I grew up on used to be a sanatorium. It was a health cures clinic at the turn of the last century and people would come from far and wide to soak in the fluoride. It’s interesting that fluoride does increase serotonin. There could be some ways that people feel better by soaking in water full of fluoride aside from simply the therapeutic benefit of bathing outdoors in beautiful nature and soaking in warm water that came straight from the earth. But fluoride is actually really not a very healthy mineral at all. That’s an understatement. Fluoride is really actually very toxic to the body and there is some question as to the degree to which fluoride is absorbed through the skin. I’ll go through that a little later. But the point is that I grew up in a place where fluoride was abundant, naturally occurring, not only in the spring water but of course that can also accumulate in soil. So there are numerous areas across the world that have very large amounts of naturally occurring fluoride and the southwestern part of the United States where I grew up is one of these places. The thing is we know quite a bit about fluoride and how damaging it is in the body precisely because fluoride is a mineral that is naturally occurring and affects about a third of the global population in terms of health effects. It can be in very very high concentrations in certain parts of India and China and the southwestern part of the United States where I grew up. So there’s a lot of scientific literature about fluoride. We know a lot about it. We know a lot about its mineral dynamics, how it affects the body, and all the negative impacts that it has.
So I just happened to have grown up in a place where there was a lot of fluoride to the point where it was actually very difficult for the community members to grow food because the high fluoride content of the water would build up in the soil and not a lot of plants like fluoride. There are some plants that do like fluoride. Tobacco and green and black tea are two plants that are well known to uptake fluoride and concentrate fluoride and I’ll go into that a little later. But basically fluoride in too high of concentrations is a problem. So I have no idea the extent to which fluoride was actually absorbed into my body through soaking in these hot springs. There is a very small amount of evidence showing that it’s not readily absorbed. This could be because chlorine binds to calcium, so usually calcium fluoride is in theory maybe not well absorbed through the skin, through the lipid layer of the skin. But I kind of doubt this. I kind of question this because I mean in pretty much any other naturally occurring healing mineral spring that I’ve visited, for example the Homestead Crater in Utah which is very high in magnesium and calcium, you feel a very distinct benefit from soaking in water high in those minerals and presumably that’s one reason why people have been drawn to these mineral springs throughout the ages because the body does absorb it. So I find it highly unlikely that it’s not absorbed, especially when you consider the mucous membranes of certain parts of our bodies that we know do readily absorb minerals more than others. So I do believe that I was impacted by the high fluoride content in the water that I was bathing in. And I want to mention another mineral that has had a huge impact on my personal health and that is copper.
So copper is one of the first minerals that I first encountered, aside from like the major electrolytes like potassium and magnesium, the first micronutrient that I ever started experimenting with that hugely, hugely helped me to heal from chronic migraine. Copper is a critical mineral. It’s similar to iodine and fluoride, a very controversial mineral in the sense that it is very much demonized and yet it is so important for things like breaking down histamine, for things like the elasticity of the blood vessels in our vascular tree. That’s really important that we can modulate blood flow to the head to bring oxygen from blood into the head since chronic migraine is a problem of hypoxia or low tissue oxygen. If you don’t have enough copper in your tissues to have the elasticity, since copper is needed for elastin, for the blood vessels to constrict and modulate blood flow to the head, you’ll be much more prone to migraines. And especially if you have histamine-related migraines, you will have worse migraines if you are low in copper because the copper is needed for the superoxide dismutase, or sorry, the diamine oxidase enzyme that helps to break down histamine.
I grew up in the same area that was not only high in fluoride but also very high in copper. I grew up near one of the largest copper mines in the world, owned by a large multinational corporation, and I remember driving by on my way to town, driving by this enormous open pit copper mine. This area in southwestern New Mexico where I grew up used to be very rich in silver. The silver was mined out, and now it is primarily a copper mine. So I think it’s interesting and ironic that fluoride, which actually lowers copper and displaces copper, that I had high fluoride probably from soaking in these pools, which may have depleted my copper, and that I grew up in a copper-rich area. And yeah, I grew up in an area where this copper was being exported. In other words, it’s an interesting metaphor, this open pit copper mine, for the deficiency state of copper that I was in. There are a lot of other things in our environment that deplete things like copper. For example, glyphosate roundup is something that’s ubiquitous in our food supply. That is a chelator. It steals micronutrients that we need like copper. But in any case, unbeknownst to myself early on in my life, I was already being greatly affected by fluoride and may have been copper deficient.
You need vitamin A or retinol, which is not the same thing as beta carotene, to make copper bioavailable. And copper is also critical for people with migraine because copper works with iron in hemoglobin to bring oxygen into the cells, which is necessary to prevent migraine since migraine is a state of hypoxia. When we hear about theories about what migraine is, like cortical spreading depression or high CGRP levels, all of those are downstream effects of hypoxia. So when we talk about healing migraine, we want to be sure that we’re doing so through the lens of increasing oxygen in the cells and also increasing the health of the mitochondria, which produce cellular energy for us. If you are low in copper or you have very high amounts of fluoride in your body, especially if you are iodine deficient, that will be very difficult to do to have sufficient ATP and mitochondrial energy for everything in your body to work. But I’m getting a little bit too technical into the mineral dynamics here. I just want you to know that I had a lot of exposure to fluoride early on and then when I hit, I think my first dose of antibiotics I ever had in my life was when I was 12 years old. So it’s interesting that right when my hormones shifted and then I hit puberty at age 12 was actually the time when I had the largest hit of pharmaceuticals in my life. My parents hadn’t vaccinated me until that point and we went to Mexico and I got caught up on some vaccines. So not only did I get exposed to monosodium glutamate in the oral polio vaccine, but I also had my first round of antibiotics and I started to develop headaches around that time. It could be that it was the fluoride in the antibiotics. I don’t know because fluoride-based antibiotics didn’t come onto the scene until the early 80s. So I am not sure whether or not the antibiotics I had had fluoride in them, but currently about a third of all pharmaceuticals contain fluoride. So it is certainly one of the major sources of fluoride toxicity. But if you get a fluoride-based antibiotic and you already have a large body burden of fluoride or you’re deficient in the minerals like copper iodine that would normally shuttle that fluoride out, you’re more likely to be harmed by antibiotics or other pharmaceuticals that contain fluoride.
In any case, my headaches did start at that time. I’m sure some of that had to do with other factors. I don’t want to say it’s all fluoride. I’m sure some of it had to do with hormonal shifts that were taking place as I hit puberty. I also developed scoliosis. Many people with migraine have scoliosis. It’s interesting that fruit trees, orange trees in Florida that are grown in copper deficient soil, their branches twist in a spiral shape. I believe that copper deficiency may be playing a role in the tendency towards scoliosis. In any case, whatever the cause of the scoliosis, curvature in the spine, which many people with migraine have, will mean that the nerves coming out of the spinal column that innervate our major organs will be affected. If you imagine a kink in your spine right in the place where, say, the nerve that goes and innervates the liver comes out, that might affect how well your liver works. I do still have a lot of congestion in my liver. I think that’s from a combination of not only the way that pharmaceuticals, especially pharmaceuticals high in fluoride, I was exposed to later, damaged my liver, but also the way in which those nerves coming out of the spine that innervate the liver may have been impacted by the curvature in my spine.
By 12, I had headaches here and there. I was very sensitive to MSG. I had scoliosis, but I just lived my life. Then I had another dose of antibiotics when I was 16. And I started developing acne. Acne is a cystic condition, and all cystic conditions are caused by iodine deficiency. It’s also interesting that there is some evidence in the literature that people with migraine actually have cysts in their brain. There’s many ways to look at migraine. But iodine deficiency leads to cysts, cysts in the thyroid gland, dense cystic breast tissue, ovarian cysts, so many health issues that women have, endometriosis, uterine fibroids, fibromyalgia is also a cystic condition, polycystic ovarian syndrome, dense breast tissue, all of these cystic conditions are caused by iodine deficiency. Women really, really need iodine. We need iodine more than men. This is because our breasts and our ovaries have a much greater demand for iodine. So we don’t want to put our bodies in a position where the body is having to decide what to do with a very small amount of iodine at the expense of other functions it needs. Iodine has so many functions in the body. Iodine is needed to chelate out heavy metals. That’s including fluoride. Fluoride is not technically a heavy metal, but it does chelate out fluoride. Iodine kills viruses, bacteria, and funguses. It’s antifungal. Iodine is obviously needed for thyroid function and thyroid hormone, but it’s also needed for breast tissue and ovaries. So you don’t want to be in a position where you have anything like fluoride interfering with iodine, and you don’t want to be in a position where you have so little iodine that your body has to decide whether it’s going to use it for this or another thing when all of those functions are critical.
So I do believe that many people are very deficient in iodine. I’ll go more into iodine later about why iodine is so important, but just suffice it to say that I think I have basically been suffering from a mild form of subclinical hypothyroidism for most of my life. I noticed once I balanced out my minerals that needed for thyroid function, which are not just iodine, my thyroid gland became much smaller, and I guess I had never realized that I had a swollen thyroid gland because it had always been so swollen that it just looked normal to me. Unfortunately, thyroid disease is not always detected by blood tests, and I guess I’ll go into that in another episode. But the point is that my long journey of healing from chronic migraine has led me to the realization that migraine is a hypothyroid condition. Many naturopaths are aware of this. You’ll see some naturopaths prescribe a multi-mineral, a high in selenium. For people who have migraine, they know that hypothyroidism and migraine is connected, but you’ll often see in many of these formulations there will be some herbs and then there will certainly be selenium in there, maybe a little bit of iodine, although there’s a lot of controversy around iodine, and it just so happens that selenium lowers copper, which you also need for your thyroid function. So all of this just to say that it’s no wonder that people aren’t healing from migraine because this is very complex. There are many minerals needed to make thyroid hormone, and so most doctors are not, when you go in with migraine, they’re not saying, let’s check your thyroid, and even if they do, your blood labs will not necessarily indicate hypothyroidism, and certainly most doctors are not looking at your mineral status and seeing whether you have the correct balance of manganese, iron, magnesium, copper, and iodine, and selenium for proper thyroid function. So that’s what a hair tissue mineral analysis can provide, a direction for developing a strategy around that. But getting back to my own healing journey.
So I had, I believe, some degree of hypothyroidism unbeknownst to myself. I had more antibiotics in my mid-20s, mostly to deal with the cystic acne, which was caused by iodine deficiency. Ironically, I took antibiotics that probably contained fluoride, which further depleted my iodine, since fluoride does deplete iodine, and indeed, my acne got worse after getting off of the antibiotics. No big surprise there, because I had more fluoride in my body, right, and less iodine. So then by the time I was in my early 30s, I had another round of antibiotics, and I will say almost all of my health conditions have come from pharmaceuticals, aside from maybe the water that I was soaking in when I was a kid. And I definitely see this as a pattern in many of the people who come to me. This is why, you know, there’s more and more and more people who have chronic migraine, because we have more and more exposure to fluoride. So by the time I was 31, my migraines were pretty bad. My acne was also pretty bad. And then when I was 34, when I had a C-section operation, I had fluoride in the form of both antibiotics and anesthesia. So a lot of people know the antibiotics are poisonous to the body. They kill healthy gut flora that we need for optimal gut function, but it’s more than that. It’s also the problem that most antibiotics, not all, but many antibiotics contain fluoride. So the fluoride does a lot of damage, and I’ll go into that shortly, what it does, but the bottom line is that my chronic migraines, well, my migraines became chronic at the point when I was exposed to anesthesia and antibiotics. There were other factors, of course, as well, which was that I was breastfeeding, in other words, giving away my iodine to my baby for two years and also not getting a lot of sleep from breastfeeding at night. And it was a complete and total nightmare. So I lived in a migraine, I lived in a headache for about two and a half years, and I had two to three migraines a week for the first two and a half years of my son’s life. It was absolute hell. It was a prison of pain. And there were many other comorbidities and symptoms that I had alongside the migraines, bloating, indigestion, depression, weird nerve sensations in my legs that felt kind of like MS, just a whole host of issues, psoriasis, dry skin issues. These are all, by the way, downstream effects of hypothyroidism. No doctor could help me, and so I set out on a quest to heal myself because I realized at a certain point it was up to me. And I experimented with many things, basically finding a way to keep my migraines at bay through a protocol that I called the Simply Well Protocol, which was a collection of folk medicine approaches and mostly culinary approaches to staving off migraine symptoms. Many of these things that I learned how to do through folk medicine actually happened to be steps that I was taking that were replenishing my electrolytes. So I was doing mineral balancing at that point, even though I didn’t really understand minerals at that point. And then once I started to study hair tissue mineral analysis formally, that’s when I started to get real leverage, when I started to understand these mineral relationships. The only problem was that the hair tissue mineral analysis lab does not reveal the toxic halides, fluoride, bromide, and chlorine or iodine. So it actually took me up until a few years ago, like two years ago, when I started to connect the dots with fluoride and these toxic halides. But I did get a lot of leverage in my mid-30s, balancing my major electrolytes and detoxifying and balancing those micronutrients that I’ll be talking about soon here. So the micronutrients, again, needed for thyroid function are mostly manganese, iron, magnesium, copper, iodine, and selenium. And all of those except for iodine show up on a hair tissue mineral analysis. So it’s been a very long journey, and I just really, again, want to spread the word as to why and how fluoride is so damaging. So to start off, why is fluoride damaging? It’s damaging mostly because it displaces iodine, but it does a whole host of other things as well.
So again, your thyroid gland needs iodine to work. If you are taking fluoride and you don’t eat a lot of iodine or get a lot of iodine in your diet, your body will have to make thyroid hormone from fluoride, and a lot of things just will not work well. So hypothyroidism, basically, the reason it’s so important is because the thyroid gland is our thermostat of our body. It regulates the body temperature. And when our body temperature is slightly too low or too high, so too high would be hyperthyroidism, too low would be hypothyroidism, the molecules in the body are coiled too loose or too tight. So when the body is too cold, those molecules and enzymes are coiled tightly. And when your body temperature is too hot, those enzymes are coiled loosely. And that actually affects how well the enzymes work. So even if you’re taking other nutrients, those enzymes will not work well if your temperature is off. They call this multiple enzyme deficiency or dysfunction, I think it’s called. Dr. Wilson called it that. It will affect all the enzymes in your body that make neurotransmitters and hormones if your body temperature is off. So it’s really, really, really important that our thyroid gland works. And it can’t do so in the presence of fluoride. I want to read a quote to you here from Dr. Jerry Tennant. He wrote the great book, Healing is Voltage. He got extremely sick. He’s actually a doctor who developed a LASIK surgery, a total genius. And he inhaled some viruses when he was doing a laser surgery on someone, and it seriously damaged his health. And he was able to heal himself by way of healing his thyroid gland, but also with the realization that healing is voltage. In other words, the electrical signaling in our body affects the health of our body. And it’s also a measure of pH. I won’t get into that too much right here right now, but all of this just to say that minerals are conductive. Minerals allow us to conduct electricity. And that’s one way through lens through which we can look at health is through the voltage in our bodies. So when we have low voltage, we have a lot of pain. And low voltage is a low oxygen state. He says the symptoms of hypothyroidism and fluoride poisoning are indistinguishable. And in this book, Healing is Voltage, he literally has a table and a list of hypothyroid symptoms. And then he has a table and a list of fluoride toxicity symptoms. They match up perfectly. In fact, there are very few symptoms that aren’t hypothyroid symptoms, even things like heart disease and osteoporosis, candida overload. These are all downstream effects of hypothyroidism.
So I started to realize that I needed to detox fluoride. This was much later. And I had made a lot of headway before even realizing that. But it was a little confusing to because before I even started studying hair tissue mineral analysis, I had read about, you know, migraine and the thyroid gland. And so I had started taking selenium and iodine in the form of kelp to try to support my thyroid gland. And guess what? I got a goiter. I didn’t understand why. And I think I do understand why. I have a few explanations at least. Why would someone who has hypothyroidism get a goiter when they take selenium and iodine? Well, it just so happens selenium is a copper antagonist. So anyone going into taking high doses of selenium who is deficient in copper will, it will lower their copper even further, exacerbating their hypothyroidism. Iodine also lowers copper. And a lot of iodine found in kelp is contaminated with other metals. This is because iodine is a chelator. It’s a heavy metal chelator. So in the ocean, if you have kelp with iodine in it, that iodine may very well may have bound to cadmium or other heavy metals. So you want to get a really, really good source of kelp if you’re using kelp. That’s why I don’t use kelp for iodine personally. But I think the point is, is that I basically took iodine and selenium without knowing the status of the rest of the minerals that are needed to make thyroid function. That’s why things like the re-pattern migraine coursework that I offer that explain how all of this works are so useful. And that’s why a hair tissue mineral analysis lab is so useful. Because even though that lab doesn’t show the fluoride or iodine, it does show the other minerals like iron and manganese and copper that work together with iodine and selenium to make thyroid hormone. If you don’t know the status of those minerals, you could really screw things up by just taking iodine or selenium. So a word of caution around that. And if you do want to know what your hair tissue mineral analysis labs look like, that comes with the re-pattern migraine coursework. And all of that is explained in the coursework. So I basically created a goiter early on because I didn’t know enough about mineral dynamics. And I knew that migraine and thyroid were connected because every time I would get a migraine, my liver would kind of ache on the right hand side. And then my thyroid would ache on the left hand side. And so I knew, and this makes sense because the liver processes thyroid hormones. So it makes sense that when my liver was congested, my thyroid hormones weren’t working well. And we also know that menstruation, which is when most women get migraines, is a more hypothyroid state than at other times of the month in your cycle. So it took me quite a long time to figure all this out.
And one reason I think it maybe took me a while is because fluoride is a very controversial mineral, as is iodine.
Whether or not fluoride is damaging is a hugely politicized issue. This is because there’s a whole industry that’s trying to offload an industrial waste product, sodium fluoride, into the population and doing so successfully through water and through toothpaste. So similar to the vaccine debate, there’s this question of safety and many of the people who are questioning the safety of fluoride are being told that they’re just crazy and that this has been studied.
And there’s even literature out there that’s even describing fluoride as an essential nutrient and even saying things like fluoride deficiency, which is a total misnomer. The body, there’s no proven or known use of fluoride in the body nutritionally. Just because fluoride hardens teeth on a chemical mechanical level doesn’t mean there’s a nutritional use for it in the body.
There’s never been any enzyme that’s been shown to be dependent on fluoride. There is no nutritional use whatsoever for fluoride. So the body has to deal with it and handle it.
And it does so by, if you have sufficient iodine, your body will be able to shuttle that fluoride out. However, if you’re iodine deficient, it will accumulate in tissues. It will calcify tissues.
It will bind to calcium. It will calcify, for example, your pineal gland, which you need for proper signaling to all the other endocrine organs in your body. Fluoride does so much damage and I should probably do an episode just on how bad it is, but to just give a little overview here.
It depletes the body of all the major electrolytes. It lowers all the steroid hormones in the body. Again, it calcifies all the glands.
It depletes iodine, which you need for many things, but especially for preventing cancer. It weakens bone tissue, unless it’s bound to calcium, in which case it will concentrate in that area. It acidifies the body.
Anytime you’re acidifying the body, you’re actually causing osteoporosis because the body will pull calcium from the bones to buffer that acidity. It damages all the major organs, the brain, the liver, the adrenal glands, the kidneys. It is hugely damaging and should be avoided.
It is, I believe, like the next lead. I believe that it is the most overlooked public health problem that exists, to the point where I would love to go to graduate school and study toxicology and do anything I can to try to prevent fluoride from disrupting people’s physiology. It’s absolutely wrong to put it in water and it’s wrong to put it in toothpaste, but it’s in many other things as well.
Even if you live in a municipality where the water is not fluoridated, you’re still getting chlorine, but better if there’s no fluoride. You’re probably wiping your ass with fluoride every day. Almost all toilet papers contain what they call these forever chemicals, the PFAS chemicals, which are fluoride-based, flame retardants, which are in our sofas and some clothing, and many pieces of furniture are affecting our kids and ourselves.
They’re full of fluoride. Flame retardants, for example, that are used for forest fires, where I live in Washington State, there was a huge forest fire nearby me and there were planes flying overhead dumping enormous amounts of fluoride on us. So if you think that just because your water isn’t fluoridated, you’re not getting exposed to fluoride, that’s probably not the case.
Teflon pans are full of fluoride. And then there’s also these other halides like bromide and chlorine that are also competing with iodine. So you hear about people with chronic migraine saying that soaking in hot tubs is gonna give them a migraine.
Well, it very well could be that it’s not just the vasodilation caused by soaking in hot water that’s causing the headache, but the fact that their body is absorbing bromide, which is a toxic halide that depletes the body of iodine, and that may be another reason why they get headaches soaking in a pool or swimming in a chlorinated pool. Or when they drink kombucha, is it the fermentation in the kombucha or is it the fluoride in the green tea in the kombucha? Or when they drink wine, is it the sulfites in the wine or is it the fact that most wine comes from California and actually 80% of all grapes that are grown in the United States are grown in a region of California that are sprayed with creolite, which is a fluoride-based pesticide to kill this one moth that lives in that particular area. Fluoride-based medications are increasing.
So in addition to antibiotics and anesthesia, not all, but most antibiotics and anesthesia, steroids, antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications also contain fluoride. And there are many medications that contain bromide. Flour is brominated.
If you’re not eating organic flour, you are probably getting bromide in your flour. So on top of all the molds and rancid oils in many flours, you wonder why people are sensitive to wheat. Well, wheat is not only often full of mold and rancid oils, but it is often sprayed with Roundup if it is not organic, which is a chelator of important minerals, and it can also be brominated.
So you definitely wanna avoid that. I go into all of this in my Repattern Migraine coursework. I have a very comprehensive list of how to avoid these toxic halides, but that’s just a very quick overview there.
Those of you who drink coffee or any kind of juice that’s bottled in a plant in a city that has fluoridated water, even if your water isn’t fluoridated, you’re gonna be getting fluoride. If you avoid coffee and drink green or black tea, that is a plant that uptakes fluoride readily, you will probably be getting a lot of fluoride that way. So this is a problem, it’s ubiquitous, and it’s something that if you have migraines, you will benefit hugely from stopping that.
And again, I go into a lot of how to do that in my Repattern Migraine coursework. So I’ve talked about the damaging effects of fluoride, some of the mineral dynamics that fluoride has with other minerals, the importance of iodine, what iodine does for our body, some of the other mineral cofactors that are needed along with iodine for thyroid function. And now I just wanna talk a little bit about some of the politics of fluoride.
So I started to go into this, but basically, because this is in our water supply and because fluoride does harden teeth, actually, with too much fluoride exposure, it will actually change the tubules of the dentin on the teeth for the worse. There’s a sweet spot there, right? But because it is helpful for hardening teeth and because it is an industrial waste product, the industry that is promoting fluoride has basically made this one of those controversial issues where people who are questioning its safety, which they’ve done from the get-go, ever since water fluoridation started happening back in the 60s, people have been opposing this and questioning this. There’s definitely a spin campaign designed to make people who are questioning this seem crazy.
And I just wanna point out that, again, if we wanna get really tangible and not political, but just really tangible in the biochemistry of fluoride, fluoride is the most electronegative mineral on the table of the elements. In other words, it creates enormous oxidative stress and there’s no controversy about that. This is just a fact of its chemistry.
This is why it’s so useful for use in medications because that quality that it has affects how well it can drive the other medications or the other chemicals in the medication into the tissues. So in the case of water and toothpaste, I believe that these are routes for offloading industrial waste. Fluoride is a by-product of phosphate and aluminum and fertilizer production.
Prior to when the EPA, and I forget when this was in the 70s or 80s, prior to the point when the EPA required that the phosphate fertilizer industry stop basically off-gassing the fluoride into the air, they didn’t, actually it might’ve even been earlier when they did that, they didn’t have this huge amount of this industrial waste product. So when it was going into the air, it was coming down in the rain and damaging crops and killing cattle. And so the EPA said that they couldn’t release this into the air so that it had to be scrubbed.
And basically they ended up with this industrial waste product that they now put in toothpaste in the form of sodium fluoride and they now put in our water supply. But in the case of pharmaceuticals, the reason it’s being used and the amounts of fluoride are not as high in pharmaceuticals. The reason it’s being used again is because it’s a driver for these other chemicals in the medications.
It’s very effective in that way. It has very unique chemical properties that other chemicals don’t have. So it’s very indispensable for certain things in that way.
But if you think about the cumulative effect of not only iodine deficiency, but the amount of fluoride people are getting innocently in their toothpaste or their water combined with the amount of exposure that they get through medications and this fluoride once it enters the body does not leave the body readily because again, it binds to tendons and calcifies and builds up in tissues even years later. And then you add to that that people are cooking in Teflon pans or soaking in bathtubs full of bromide or drinking wine sprayed with fluoride or even in dental floss, wiping their butt with toilet paper full of fluoride, using tampons full of fluoride, sitting on sofas full of fluoride, flossing their teeth with, dental floss even contains fluoride. This stuff is everywhere.
We have to wake up to this reality and get this out of our system. All right, I’m very passionate about this. So yeah, it’s damaging, it is ubiquitous and it’s not something that your body is likely to be able to thrive under the conditions of constant exposure to that.
Now, I know I’m getting close. Well, I’ve been talking for almost 40 minutes here. So I’m gonna try to wrap things up here but I wanna give you a few resources around if you’re really wondering if it’s true that fluoride is as bad as it is, especially if you’re someone who feels that you’ve benefited from it for your teeth and your oral health, here’s a good resource that I recommend.
It’s an episode on the What’s the Juice with Olivia Amatrano podcast. It is, let’s see, it’s called Mouth Breathing, What Your Dentist Isn’t Telling You and the Truth About Fluoride. This is an interview with functional dentist, Dr. Stacey Whitman, who used to be a huge proponent of fluoride before she started looking deeper into it and she woke up to its toxicity and now she sends the alarm about it.
She is based out of Portland, Oregon. There are a few other resources for fluoride. A really good one is the Hidden Cause of Acne.
If you have acne, this is a great resource for you to be able to understand how and why acne is being caused by fluoride. So whether you suffer from migraines or not, if you know anyone or have any friends or family members suffering from acne, this is definitely caused by fluoride toxicity. That’s a great book and resource to learn more about, even if you don’t have acne, to learn more about the sociology and history of how fluoride has become so ubiquitous and how damaging it is.
Another resource is called Fluoride, The Aging Factor. That’s an older book, I forget the author’s name. And it is an aging factor.
Fluoride, again, because it calcifies tissues, it contributes to wrinkles and dehydration. And fluoride does so much, I could probably do a whole podcast on it. It actually also damages the microvilli in the small intestine, affecting absorption.
It also affects stomach acid since iodine is needed for stomach acid and fluoride displaces iodine. So that’s gonna affect digestion. The thing that your body really needs with getting back to oral health for healthy tooth mineralization is iodine.
They have shown definitively that iodine concentrations in saliva affect the mineralization of teeth. So we would want iodine instead of fluoride. And since fluoride displaces iodine, fluoride is not good for oral health.
Also because iodine is needed by every gland in the body that excretes or secretes anything. That includes the adrenal glands. Iodine is essential for gallbladder function, for basically everything.
You don’t wanna do anything that compromises iodine. I may talk about iodine in another episode soon here, but I wanna wrap this one up here. I really hope that you found this interesting.
My personal history and story of learning more about fluoride and iodine and the impact that it had on my own health. And I hope that this information wakes you up to the real serious need to be aware of fluoride toxicity. And the first thing you can do is just stop all of those inputs.
If you wanna know more about how to detoxify fluoride, I have a whole section on that. Iodine does remove fluoride, but iodine, because it kills viruses and speeds up the thyroid gland and removes heavy metals at the same time, is not tolerated well by all people. And again, you do need to know what the mineral status of your other minerals is on your hair tissue mineral analysis so that you don’t start taking a bunch of iodine and depleting other minerals that you need for your thyroid function in the process.
Feel free to check out the Repattern Migraine Masterclass if you would like to get your own hair tissue mineral analysis and start to make headway in not only stopping these toxic halides from getting in your system, but also learning how to remove them and nourish your body with the other minerals needed for optimal thyroid function. You can heal your chronic migraines.
It’s absolutely possible. It does take some doing, depending on how long you’ve been suffering, but I, myself, and my other clients are a testament to the fact that you absolutely can heal this chronic condition, but it’s hard to do it alone. It’s unnecessary to do it alone, and it’s very hard to do it without understanding mineral dynamics.
So I hope you enjoy that resource. Check it out at mineralsformigraines.com, and thanks for listening. Pass this on to anyone who you think may benefit.
I hope that this podcast has inspired you to know that healing your migraines is not only possible, but can be a deep, transformational, and alchemical journey of awakening. The process of healing migraine involves learning to access all of the healing medicines that Mother Nature has made available to you, appreciating your body’s incredible resiliency, tuning into your authentic self and honoring it, and empowering yourself to be devoted to your healing for the long haul. You don’t have to be an expert to heal migraine.
My own journey healing from fluoride toxicity is a testament to that. Stay tuned for more upcoming episodes, and be sure to check out all of my resources, including the Repattern Migraine Masterclass on my website, mineralsformigraines.com. I care about you, and I’m here as an ally to help you thrive.
