Is Fluoride Affecting Your Child’s Health?

Episode Transcript

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Hi everyone, welcome to the show. I am Dr. Nicole and today, we are going to talk about fluoride and how it may be impacting your child’s development and behavior. Now when most of us think of fluoride, we think of teeth and the dentist, right? I mean, after all, dentists have been telling us for years fluoride is the key to keeping our teeth strong, preventing cavities for us and our kids. Most of us in the United States have Fluoride added to our water, we may use toothpaste with fluoride in it, other kinds of oral health products that we use regularly — and I have to admit that as a parent, for years, I never really questioned or looked into whether fluoride was something my kids and I actually needed, I didn’t really research what the potential problems with fluoride can be, and it turns out that there are several concerns with fluoride exposure and these issues go way beyond our teeth. So to help us dive into this and understand these issues and the history of how so many of us have gotten exposed to so much fluoride in the first place is Melissa Gallico. Let me tell you a little bit about Melissa.

She is a former military intelligence officer, Fulbright scholar, and intelligence specialist at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, where she instructed classes for FBI analysts at Quantico and provided analytic support for national security investigations. She is the author of ‘The Hidden Cause of Acne’ and host of The Gallico Show, a podcast dedicated to exposing the pollution story behind artificial water fluoridation in the United States. Melissa graduated with honors from Georgetown University and has a master’s degree from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. She is one of the most knowledgeable people out there on this topic and it is such a pleasure to have her with us on the show here today. Welcome, Melissa!

Melissa Gallico:

Thank you so much for having me. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

So I’m reading your bio — super impressive. You’ve got this amazing background, but not in anything related to fluoride or health, and so we have to start by hearing your story of how did you come to specialize in the topic of fluoride sensitivity, given what your background is?

Melissa Gallico:

Well, it certainly wasn’t by choice, I’ll tell you that. I never set out to develop an expertise in fluoride but because of my job, I had the opportunity of living in a lot of different places and for the last 25 years, I have moved probably once a year or once every two years. And a lot of that has been international travel and I just always had cystic acne and I noticed when I lived in certain countries, it just cleared up right away, and then I would come to the States, even for a week and it would start back up again, and the dermatologists all told me it’s genetic, it’s hormonal — and I tried all of the Accutane and different prescription drugs, and they did help, but I was never able to figure out the root cause. Why does it clear up in these other countries? And eventually, after about 20 years of having acne, I realized it was because of the fluoride in my diet. I had done my research and I knew that topical fluoride exposure like toothpaste can cause acne-like eruptions, but I never had seen any research about fluoride in your diet causing acne. So I just tested it out. Very simply stopped drinking fluoridated water and saw such a huge improvement that I knew I was onto something. 

So I just started researching, well what else contains fluoride, and eventually, I was able to clear my skin completely, no matter where I lived, even if there is a lot of fluoride in the water. And I thought this was maybe a weird allergy that I had or some kind of rare sensitivity, and I just wrote a little guide, a PDF guide, I put it online, it was free. And I said, “If anybody has this other weird allergy — it’s acne, but it clears up by avoiding fluoride.” And I started hearing from so many people, and I couldn’t believe it, because I was looking at the number of people downloading the guide, and I just thought, this statistically — I shouldn’t be hearing from this many people. A woman sent me an email with the line, “Your book saved my life.” And I just thought, oh my goodness. I have to write an actual book. So I turned it into a book, I put it on Amazon — again, the reviews just added up. People saying they’ve had acne for 30 years and finally, it’s gone. So a publisher came along and published it and now it’s actually out there in the world, and that’s how I came to be doing these interviews about fluoride. It really disrupted my life, but I am very happy to be able to share this information with people because it’s not something that would be on your radar unless you had this experience of moving back and forth and happen to be an intelligence analyst and figure out that it was the fluoride.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Yeah, well I was going to say you really used your background in academics and sort of investigation and things to get to the root of your own health issue, and I think for so many people, who specialize in some of these things related to health, it was a personal experience that brought them to that, but what you said about just the fact that you moved is really what allowed you to kind of test that out and see the difference, and I think for most of us, we stay in one place or in one general area, or certainly within the same country and just whether it’s fluoride or other things, it’s just not on our radar to think about how that stuff may be impacting us. So I want to have you talk about why should we be concerned about fluoride? So you discovered that this was connected to your acne and since have discovered that it’s connected to lots of things beyond acne, but why should we be concerned about this? I mean we’re told by dentists, that the general mainstream idea, at least in this country, is that it’s very safe, you actually need to have exposure to this to keep your teeth healthy. So why should we be concerned?

Melissa Gallico:

So like you mentioned, it’s not just acne. That’s how I happened to react to it in a very short amount of time. The reaction is within a few hours, so that’s how I was able to piece it together so confidently, that this was very clear, observing this reaction over the years that that was the trigger. But other people manifest reactions to fluoride in different ways. So I’m not the first person to discover that fluoride causes acne, I was reading later that there was a well-known allergist named George Waldbott who in the 50s, after fluoridation was introduced, he observed all of these hypersensitive reactions to fluoride in people like me. And it wasn’t just acne, it was also like hives or skin rashes, so other skin conditions, but some people developed gastrointestinal problems. So they’d drink lots of water and within a few hours, they would have digestive upset, or it’s a trigger for migraines.

A lot of people have noticed that and it’s really, really hard to diagnose that because it’s in the water. You’re drinking it every day and you just think, oh, I’m one of those people who gets migraines — and you can’t figure it out but it’s because of fluoride and it’s so ubiquitous that it’s just really difficult, even a lot of migraine experts don’t know that that can be a trigger. And so it’s having reactions far beyond skin conditions. Other things besides that, is it affecting your endocrinological function, so depressing thyroid function which throws a whole bunch of other things out of whack and I think you probably covered that in a few episodes. So that’s why we should be concerned about it. It’s not just acne. You don’t drink fluoride and it just goes to your teeth. It’s going throughout your entire body and it can affect all of those systems. And George Waldbott, the one thing he said after years and years of studying these hypersensitive reactions to fluoride is the only thing predictable about how someone will respond to fluoride is that it will be unpredictable. It could be any different system. So that’s why we should be concerned about it. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

In preparing for this interview and in some writing I was doing a few months ago, I came across some research actually about fluoride exposure in children as it relates to cognitive functions and that overexposure to fluoride really can negatively impact children’s development, their cognitive functioning, their attention, things like that — and so there is some information out there about this in the research literature that it certainly isn’t getting widely promoted. We’re not hearing about it unless we go and look for it, right?

Melissa Gallico:

Right. That is the most concerning aspect to me, the neurotoxic effects of fluoride. When we started fluoridation in the 1950s, they were not thinking about that at all. They were doing very rudimentary studies about — they drink fluoride, how many cavities do these children have? And they weren’t thinking about how it affects other parts of the body. Really in 2012, there was a big meta-analysis from Harvard researchers and they looked at all the research from all over the world about how fluoride is affecting the brain and they concluded that fluoride is a neurotoxin that should be a high research priority for public health officials to look at how fluoride is affecting children. And whenever they have done that, there is just so much bias within the public health community that this is good, because we’ve been doing it for so long and it’s just kind of assumed at this point that any research that says fluoride isn’t — well, that can’t be right! We’ve been doing it for so long and we’re all functioning, we’re still here.

But that’s just how we’ve always done things with toxins. We think, oh it’s just a small amount, it’s not bad — and then decades and decades later, we learn that that small amount actually is really bad over a long period of time. So there’s research coming out on this, it seems like every month, a new study from a toxicologist — there was just one that came out in May from a toxicologist in the University of Washington, Steven Gilbert, he is the founder of the Institute of Neurotoxicology and Neurological Disorders, and he says numerous scientific studies finding harm from fluoridation started in the 1950s and have continued to accumulate to the present day, discontinuing the practice is the preventative measure to take. So he is one of our leading toxicologists looking at this research, saying that fluoride not only affects IQ but also influences ADHD, which is, I know, something of a lot of concern to a lot of your listeners.

Dentists don’t generally work with toxicologists, they’re very focused on teeth, but there was a center in Boston, it was a dental center that hired the first toxicologist to work at a dental center in the 1990s. They recruited her from Harvard to run this center, and they said — “Why don’t you start with fluoride?”, and she said, “Sure, why not?”, had no preconceptions about it being bad for you, but her animal studies very quickly showed that fluoride crosses the blood-brain barrier, and she found that when they had prenatal exposure to fluoride, it resulted in hyperactivity, so an ADHD-type symptom, whereas postnatal exposure to fluoride was hypoactivity, more like lethargy and depressed thyroid function. So it really depended on when they were exposed, how they would react and that’s one of the things that makes it confusing. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Well, I think we’re seeing that with more and more toxins as you mentioned, right? Whether we’re talking about toxins that we get from things that are sprayed on our food or toxins from things in the environment around us, or things like fluoride, the assumption, unfortunately, at least in this country, is that  these things are safe unless proven otherwise, and so we go through generations of being guinea pigs on exposure to these things before we really understand the potential dangers. We’ve covered this on the show related to glyphosate and some other types of toxin exposure that really children and the canaries in the coal mine with these issues because their brains and their bodies are more fragile and vulnerable. They are in a phase of really fast development from a brain standpoint, from a physical standpoint and that makes many children more susceptible — especially from a neurological standpoint to the effects of these kinds of toxins. 

Melissa Gallico:

Definitely. And one thing parents can do to see if their children have been overexposed to fluoride, and this depends on when the exposure occurred, but look at their teeth and you can see. It’s a condition called dental fluorosis, which I have it, which kind of would help explain why I am hyper-sensitive to fluoride, but when children had too much fluoride when their teeth are forming, they will develop — sometimes it’s dark brown stains, but sometimes it’s more subtle than that. Maybe it will be white spots, white flecks on the tooth enamel or an opaque quality around the edges of the tooth, and that will show that during this time, when these teeth where forming, your child was consuming too much fluoride and that’s agreed across the board, CBC lowered the amount of fluoride in water a few years ago because the rates of dental fluorosis had just skyrocketed since the 1980s. The latest study I saw was over 60% of children in the United States have some form of dental fluorosis, meaning they are getting too much fluoride. So that’s an easy thing you can do. So look at their teeth, or ask their dentist: Do you see any signs of dental fluorosis? And that’s an indicator your child is getting too much fluoride. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

That’s great, a very tangible, practical thing. What are some of the other common signs of fluoride toxicity in children, are there others?

Melissa Gallico:

So dental fluorosis is the biggest one. Testing thyroid function is always a good indicator if you have a low thyroid function, that’s often tied with overexposure to fluoride. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

It may be one of those things just like with so many other things we’re exposed to, that it’s almost like we have to do what you did, which is remove it for a period of time to see what the change is, right? So I can think about that for parents who maybe are struggling with kids’ symptoms of ADHD or certain behavioral symptoms or learning issues or whatever just to see what the change might be if they reduced exposure for a while, not unlike what you did with your acne, traveling between different countries to see what the impact might be, because I think so often it’s hard to tell because we’re just so used to having this stuff. I mean especially, you think about — it’s in our tap water, and we’re constantly trying to get kids to drink more water but this is potentially a problem if they have sensitivity to this or if they are getting too much of it, having them drink tap water that’s been fluoridated could be a problem for them. 

Melissa Gallico:

That’s exactly what I recommend to people, do a 30-day fluoride-free challenge. I have one on my website where I’ll send a little email every day showing you different ways that we are exposed to fluoride and how you can cut down on that and just see what the difference is in 30 days. Do you notice any difference in your digestion or in your skin, in how you feel in your mood? I didn’t mention that one, but mood is another very good indicator. I have a whole chapter in my book about acne and depression, and they have found a very clear link between acne and depression and a lot of people think it’s because you’re so depressed that your skin looks bad, but it’s much, much deeper than that because I was used to having acne and I always thought I just have acne, I’m so used to it. But when I went back and looked at the periods in my life when I was the most depressed, it was always when there was the most fluoride in the water and it was incredible how — I have a graph in my book, like here is my mood over the last 20 years, and it was perfectly correlated with the amount of fluoride I was being exposed to, and I never called it depression until later when I felt what it was like not to have that and that’s when I realized, I wasn’t supposed to feel that way all of those years, I was supposed to feel like this, just more normal and more stable. So there is a very clear link between that. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

That’s really interesting and it’s important to remember that in children, those mood or those depression issues often show up as irritability, agitated behavior, more of what we call behavior problems, as opposed to what we typically think of depression symptoms in adults. So yeah, really relevant to what a lot of our listeners are dealing with with their kids. So this begs the question, I mean we’re talking about drinking tap water and the ways that we’re exposed to this — how did it come to be that in most parts of the US, and I think that it is the vast majority of us, right? Have public water supplies that have fluoride added to them. How did that come about?

Melissa Gallico:

So over 70% of public water supplies in the United States are artificially fluoridated. It’s less in most other countries. Fluoridation is pretty much limited to the English-speaking world, so more or less so our partners that we’ve kind of passed this along to. Canada, I think it’s the third — Australia and New Zealand are pretty heavily fluoridated and parts of England as well. Ireland has a national mandate, all of Ireland is fluoridated. What I want to get across with this podcast series that I’m launching is that fluoridation is a pollution scandal. Fluoridation was the leading form of air pollution throughout the 20th century. The #1 form of air pollution, causing more litigation than the next 10 forms of air pollution combined.

So it was just major lawsuits, especially after world war II, because we needed a lot of aluminum to build all those planes and aluminum is the leading industry that gluts fluoride, but also a lot of other industries. Coal, electric companies, fertilizer plants, all kinds of industries will put fluoride into the atmosphere because it’s the common element in the earth’s crust. So they were being sued and they hired university researchers to defend them in court, to create science that shows fluoride can’t possibly be bad for you. And those researchers, that’s what they did. They did all kinds of studies showing that oh, no, it’s not bad for you, it’s very safe — and these are the same exact researchers who were saying lead is perfectly safe. Let’s put it in our gasoline. And they were saying DDT is perfectly safe. It was all the same lab mostly that worked for industry, defending them against these lawsuits. There is a lot of primary source historical evidence for this if you look through the documentation, it’s clear that they were manipulating the science. This wasn’t unbiased science. This was very, very one-sided science and unfortunately, they have a lot of leverage in the government and they have a lot of lobbying power and a lot of money. And scientists, very reputable scientists have been refuting this from the beginning but they just don’t have the backing that they would need to do the big research studies to prove that fluoride is dangerous. So it really is a pollution scandal.  

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Fascinating, and again, something that just isn’t on our radar because it’s not being talked about. I found it interesting, I was reading through some of your materials and one of the original places that was studied as far as fluoride in the water was Grand Rapids, Michigan, which is where I live and where my clinic is, and I found that really interesting, although — did I read it right that that actually was never completed? The study on that?

Melissa Gallico:

That is a really interesting study. So that was the first big government trial of fluoridation, government experiment — let’s put it in the water, see what happens — and if you go to the National Institute of Health website, they say it was a huge success and H. Trendley Dean, the father of fluoridation did this big study. But when you look at the documentation from that time period, just two months before he agreed to do that study, he was saying, “We can’t do this, this isn’t safe, we haven’t studied anything, we don’t know how it affects anything other than teeth. There is all this evidence of harm.” And they went ahead and did it anyway, so he agreed to oversee it because they were doing it anyway.

It was like the public officials decided to do it. There was no public vote, it was just like a bunch of council members basically saying, “Let’s put this in the water and see what happens.” So right before that, he was saying this is a bad idea, but once you do it, you can’t really go back because then people can sue you for having put this in the water. So he jumped on board and it was supposed to be a 15-year study. Within 5 years, the government was like, “Hey, this is great! Let’s all do it!” So the control city, which I think is a city called Muskegon. When they endorsed fluoridation 5 years in, Muskegon was like, “Hey, let’s put fluoride in our water too!” So there is no control city to compare, to see if it even works, to see if it even reduced cavities, so the whole study was just shot from then on and they never looked for any signs of harm from then. They did just very basic physicals of school children. But what about the elderly? The elderly accumulate fluoride and develop all kinds of bone and joint disorders. That’s from fluoride. If you’re experiencing arthritis or pain in your joints, that could very likely be an early stage of skeletal fluorosis, which is another well-documented side effect of fluoride toxicity. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

So we basically did a study that ran for a third of the time it was supposed to, said oh great, this is working, let’s put it everywhere and then had no control group, really, to compare to to see what the problems might be. And of course, it became public policy now that it’s in the tap water, and I know from just bringing my children to the dentist over the years that they always ask if you don’t have city water, if you’re connected to a well or whatever, then they want to give your child fluoride treatments at the dentist’s office. So kids are getting fluoride, whether they’re getting it from their water or they’re getting it at the dentist, right? 

Melissa Gallico:

Right, and it’s in so many things other than water too. So even children that aren’t drinking fluoridated water are developing dental fluorosis because they’re being exposed to it from so many other sources.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

What are some of the other common sources? I mean toothpaste, I know that most commercially available toothpastes have fluoride in them. I had to search to find some options. It’s not easy to find options that don’t have fluoride added to them, but what are some of the other common ways that kids are exposed?

Melissa Gallico:

So anything made with fluoridated water can be high in fluoride. So all the ready-made drinks, sodas, soft drinks, and tea is a big one. Tea — Like ice tea. Tea happens to be the only plant that uptakes high amounts of fluoride from the soil naturally. So I just measured. I bought a fluoride meter and I was measuring different types of tea and I made a glass of Lipton tea, just the normal black tea bag and it was incredibly high in fluoride. 10 times what you find in fluoridated water. So that’s a big one. Even things that you wouldn’t think contain fluoridated water, like cereal, boxed breakfast cereal — if they make it with fluoridated water, that fluoride will concentrate in the cereal and it can be really high in fluoride. So if you’re hyper-sensitive I tell people to make cereals at home using full grains, that way you know what kind of water was used, so it’s less processed and much healthier that way. And then it’s also used as a pesticide, especially in this certain place of California where they grow all the raisins and they grow a lot of grapes and wine, which hopefully your child isn’t drinking wine. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Not yet, hopefully!

Melissa Gallico:

But grape products, grape juice can be very high in fluoride because of that, because it’s a pesticide. And that just is an indicator of how toxic fluoride is, that they would use it as a pesticide. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Well, I was just thinking that, like wow — so many other toxins like, we use it to kill bugs and other things but it’s totally safe for us, right?

Melissa Gallico:

Right! And it’s crazy because they admit that it’s not like it’s a different chemical. It’s all fluoride. Even the fluoride added to the public water supply — it’s not like a pharmaceutical-grade fluoride. They buy it from phosphate fertilizer plants, and these same plants used to emit it into the atmosphere and they were being sued because the farmers that lived around the plant, all their animals were dying and having all of these health effects. So they are no longer allowed to just stream fluoride pollution into the atmosphere like they did back when fluoridation first started. They have to collect that, and it’s considered a hazardous waste that’s very expensive to dispose of it. But they actually sell it to our local water providers and they add it to the water supplies. If you call your local water provider and say I want to know where the fluoride that you’re putting in the water comes from, or if you do a freedom of information act request to get that information, most likely it’s hydrofluorosilicic acid from a phosphate fertilizer plant in Florida. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Wow. So this is just more of a reason to go back to some of the things that I talk about on the show often, of eating more of the whole foods, not including more heavily processed foods in your diet because here is another thing that can be in those foods and again, while maybe a little bit here or there isn’t a big deal, it’s the build-up, right? So we’ve got it in our water that we’re drinking, we’ve got it in our toothpaste that we’re using twice a day, we’ve got it in cereals and certain foods that we’re eating, and especially when we’re thinking about small kids, that can build up quickly. I think it’s important to know that fluoride is something that is naturally occurring that we do need in very small amounts, right? And the issue is that now we’ve got an overexposure, we’re getting way more than what our body actually needs. Is that correct? 

Melissa Gallico:

Exactly. There is no research that says we need it. There are no side-effects that develop when people don’t have fluoride, but most foods have a very, very trace amount and your body can handle that without any problem, but you’re right, it bioaccumulates and it stays there for a very long time. The National Academy of Science estimates that the half-life of fluoride, which means when you consume fluoride today and it’s stored in your bones or your teeth or wherever your body stores it — half of that fluoride will be in your bones 20 years from now. That’s a very long half-life. So it’s staying in our bodies, it’s bioaccumulating and we’re just being exposed to so much of it that we develop all of these side-effects. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

So obviously reading labels becomes really important for this, like with so many other things, like reading labels on personal care products, reading labels on food products and things — what about — are there ways to sort of minimize exposure through the skin and things? I’m thinking about the fact that I know that my water here at the clinic, at my home is city water that is fluoridated. The sensitivities like with acne and some of those other things — is that applicable through what’s absorbed through the skin as well as what’s ingested through drinking it or is that a different thing?

Melissa Gallico:

It is, unfortunately. And some people are so sensitive that they can’t wash their hands in it without getting a reaction. I spoke with one woman and her son has autism, he is very sensitive to fluoride, can’t shower in it, she has a special filter on her shower, they don’t really make shower filters for fluoride, but she has something kind of DIY and just very short cold showers, or else he’ll start screaming whenever he is exposed to fluoride of any kind. So it really depends on the sensitivity level. I can shower in fluoridated water and I’m okay. I don’t like to wash my face with it. I’ll use bottled water to wash my face, but short, cooler showers and I’m okay. So it really varies, I guess, depending on your particular history, your particular sensitivity. But it is very hard to filter fluoride from the shower or from the bath unless you have a whole house filter which a lot of people can’t do because they live in an apartment or they can’t afford them because they can be expensive. So that’s a really tricky one. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Yeah, and really hard to avoid. So you talked about sort of a 30-day experiment to see what happens if you reduce exposure. So aside from obviously looking at your personal care products, things like drinking tap water — what are some of the top things people can do if a parent is thinking, “Ha! This is kind of sounding like my kid. My kid has got sensitivities to other things, I wonder if this can be an issue.” What could be one or two things that they can start trying right away?

Melissa Gallico:

The first thing I always tell people is to find a source of fluoride-free water. And while you’re doing that research, you can usually contact the manufacturer and ask them, if you’re doing bottled water or finding a filter. Distilled water is always fluoride-free because of how it’s processed, that’s one that you could just go today and get distilled water, you know it’s fluoride-free. It may not be a long-term solution because it doesn’t have the minerals that you would get in mineral water and spring water, but right now it’s an easy fix for some people. And then the toothpaste. If you go to a natural health food store or something, they usually have a lot of fluoride-free options. Those are the two biggest sources of exposure for fluoride. Then if you see a difference, then you can fine-tune it. Figuring out which foods to avoid and — one that I didn’t mention that some people are exposed to on a daily basis is pharmaceuticals. A lot of prescription pharmaceuticals contain fluoride because it will help deliver the drug throughout the body. It’s a way of helping with the systemic exposure of the drug, so it’s in a ton of very popular pharmaceuticals like Prozac and Paxil and all kinds of antibiotics and things.

So that’s another one you could look on Wikipedia and see if there’s like an F in the chemical elements for the drug, and if so, maybe talk to your doctor about switching to something that doesn’t have fluoride in it, because that can be one that really throws things off. Those I think are the biggest daily exposures to fluoride. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

I love that the people can start with looking at the water and the toothpaste and then if that seems to be making a difference, go from there, such practical, helpful information for people — you’ve got your book, ‘The Hidden Cause of Acne’, then you also have this very cool little graphic book that you put together, “F is for Fluoride’, which I found very informative and helpful even as an adult. So I want to make sure that you share with our listeners — where can they go to find these resources? Where can they find you online? Because you’ve got a ton of really helpful information for people online. Where is the best place for them to go?

Melissa Gallico:

So my book is called ‘The Hidden Cause of Acne’ and the website for that is hiddencauseofacne.com and that’s where you could go if you wanted to take the challenge, the 30-day challenge to go fluoride free, and there is a lot of information there, not just about acne but fluoride sensitivity in general. Then I also have a private Facebook group for people who are fluoride-sensitive, they just want to figure out a way to get it out of their water supply. That’s called Fluoride-free Faces. If you do the challenge, I think there is a link somewhere in there that will take you to the group where you could just find it on Facebook. And that’s really helpful because there are hundreds of people from all over the world who have been dealing with fluoride sensitivity in one way or another, and by combining all of our experiences, we’ve really learned a lot about this condition, which isn’t very well-documented in the mainstream literature. So that’s another resource, and then the podcast I am working on — and I’ve launched one episode that I’ll be putting some more out and that’s more about the pollution history and eventually I’m going to switch into how that’s affecting our health — so bringing different health experts on to talk specifically about how it’s affecting our thyroid, how it’s affecting our bones — and I want to do an episode about the neurotoxicity because that is a really important part of this whole picture. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Absolutely. Great resources, thank you for being a champion for this issue. The more I learn about it, the more I realize that we should be talking about it and thinking about it more — so thank you so much for spending time with us today and sharing all of this very valuable information with our listeners. 

Melissa Gallico:

Thank you so much for inviting me, I really appreciate the opportunity. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Alright, everybody, that does it for this episode of The Better Behavior Show, we will see you back here next time.