Medicated Water, Rotting Teeth

The convenient lie that lets government and Big Sugar off the hook.

Imagine your house is being eaten by termites. You can see them, you know what they are, and you know that the only thing they eat is timber. You call in an expert who looks at the termites, nods sagely, and then tells you the solution is to paint the entire house with a new, stronger type of paint.

It sounds plausible, right? A stronger coating to protect the structure. But then you read the fine print. The new paint does not stop the termites, it just slows them down. And it has a peculiar side effect, over time, it makes all the wood in the house more brittle.

You’d think the expert was mad. The real problem is the termites, and their proposed solution makes the very thing you're trying to save weaker in the long run (and does nothing about the termites).

Welcome to the world of dental health. We all harbour a termite called Streptococcus mutans (S. mutans for short), and for decades, our governments have been obsessed with applying a new coat of paint, while ignoring the fact that we’re serving the termites an all-you-can-eat buffet.

Meet the Real Bad Guy

There is one, and only one, reason you get cavities. It’s a little chap called S. mutans. He’s a fussy eater. He has one true love, and that love is sugar. To be more precise, he wants the two parts of sugar—glucose and fructose—in the exact 50/50 mix you find in a bag of the white stuff.

Give S. mutans what it wants, and it performs two little tricks for you. First, like any living thing that eats, it excretes waste. Its waste product is lactic acid, which is corrosive enough to dissolve your tooth enamel. Now, your body isn't defenseless against this kind of attack. Your saliva is a brilliant rinsing and neutralising agent. If it were just the acid on its own, your spit would wash most of it away before it could do any real harm.

But this is where S. mutans reveals its true genius. Its second trick is the one that really matters, and it’s a trick it can only perform when you feed it exactly what it craves: sugar. Not just any carbohydrate, but sucrose—that perfect 50/50 combination of glucose and fructose. With sugar as its building material, S. mutans doesn’t just make acid; it spins a sticky, gummy web called plaque. This plaque is a brilliant piece of biological engineering. It’s a protective housing, a biofilm bunker that glues itself to your teeth. Underneath this shield, the acid is kept hard up against your enamel, completely protected from your saliva, letting it do its destructive work undisturbed.

If you feed S. mutans pure glucose or fructose, it can only make the acid. It can’t make the plaque. Without the plaque, the acid just gets washed away. No plaque, no decay. It’s that simple. If you want to rot teeth, the most effective way is to give S. mutans a constant wash of sugar solution. Things like soft drinks, fruit juices, and energy drinks are its perfect delivery system.

You might think that tooth decay is just a normal part of being human. It’s not. It’s a modern disease. In the 1930s, a Cleveland dentist named Weston A. Price got curious. He saw rampant decay in his patients and wondered if it had always been this way. So he packed his bags and spent ten years travelling the world to find people untouched by the modern diet.

He found them. In isolated Swiss villages, among Gaelic communities in the Outer Hebrides, and with Inuit and First Nations peoples in North America. These people had no toothbrushes, no dentists, and certainly no fluoride. What they did have were perfect teeth. Price didn’t just look; he counted. Among these isolated groups, he found that less than 1% of all teeth showed any signs of decay. They had broad, healthy jaws with no need for braces.

But Price also got to witness a tragedy. In every area he visited, he found people of the same genetic stock who had moved to a nearby trading post or town and adopted the ‘modern’ diet: white flour, jams, canned goods, and, above all, sugar. The difference was catastrophic. In these modernised groups, tooth decay skyrocketed to affect over 30% of teeth. Their children developed narrowed faces, crowded teeth, and all the dental problems we now think are normal. The evidence is clear: the problem isn’t a lack of a chemical in our water; it’s the presence of sugar in our food.

And make no mistake, we are delivering that sugar by the shipload, primarily through drinks. You might think we’re all getting healthier, but don’t be fooled by the marketing. While sales of traditional sugary soft drinks have seen a slight decline in recent years, the industry has simply swapped one sugar bomb for another. The market for high-sugar ‘iced coffees’, energy and sports drinks has exploded, with these categories now accounting for billions in annual revenue in Australia. It’s a classic bait and switch, and it means our total consumption of liquid sugar remains devastatingly high.

The results are exactly what you’d expect. This isn’t some minor inconvenience. Bupa has called it a national emergency. A 2024 survey showed nearly half of all Australians (46%) had experienced a dental health problem in the last year alone. Worse, it’s hitting our kids. Over half of parents (56%) are worried about their children’s oral health, and for good reason. Almost half of Australian children (45%) had at least one dental issue in the past year, and what was the number one problem? Cavities (35%). The very thing S. mutans delivers when you feed it a high-sugar diet.

The Perfect Misdirection: Just Medicate the Water

Fixing teeth is monumentally expensive, and governments hate paying for things. So, for decades, they’ve turned to a beautifully simple, quick-fix solution - mass medication using fluoride.

Now, here’s where the story gets interesting. The chemical most often used, fluorosilicic acid, is an industrial co-product from the manufacturing of phosphate fertilisers. Yes, you read that right. We take a chemical captured in the pollution scrubbers of a fertiliser factory and add it to our drinking water.

The official line is that this strengthens our teeth. And there is no denying the policy has an economic appeal. Governments can claim they’ve “solved” the problem and saved billions in dental costs. The beverage industry, the ones selling the sugar that S. mutans loves, gets to look on with quiet approval. A solution that doesn’t require them to change a single thing about their profitable business model? What’s not to like?

The Pay-off Versus the Price

So, for letting the government put an industrial chemical in our water, what do we get?

The World Health Organisation, in a 2019 review, found a reduction in cavities of around 12.5 percent. An Australian study found it might mean the average six-year-old has one less decayed tooth. One.

That’s the prize. But what’s the price?

The thing about fluoride is that your body holds on to it. A lot of it. It accumulates in your bones and your teeth. Over time, this causes a disease called fluorosis. The same WHO report noted that the risk of both dental and skeletal fluorosis was significantly increased in heavily fluoridated areas. We are trading slightly fewer cavities now for the potential of more brittle bones and crumbling teeth later in life.

The risks are real enough that the American Dental Association warned mothers years ago to be careful about mixing infant formula with fluoridated water, to avoid causing dental fluorosis in their babies.

Not even the most wildly supportive research suggests fluoridating water cures tooth decay. It’s a patch. A Band-Aid on a bullet wound. It’s a strategy that allows the government and beverage corporations to look like they’re doing something, without ever having to confront the entity that’s actually causing the damage - the sugar industry.

Psyhopathic business rule number 1 - if you can successfully blame someone else or create a convincing distraction, you can get away with it forever. The conversation becomes about the pros and cons of the chemical ‘fix,’ while the real villain walks away, whistling, with their pockets full of cash.

If mass medication is how we solve lifestyle diseases, why stop here? Bowel cancer is on the rise, so let’s back the Metamucil trucks up to the reservoirs. Too many people smoking? Let’s dump nicotine patches in the water supply.

When they tell you the answer to a disease caused by diet is an industrial chemical in your tap water, understand that you are being played. They are banking on you being too distracted by their chemical magic trick to notice the real con. The solution isn’t in your water pipes, it’s in your shopping trolley. You can either keep swallowing their convenient lie, or you can decide to starve the real enemy.

The solution is to stop feeding the termites.