Letter to the Newspapers

I see things in a preternaturally logical way, perhaps, and I’m freely prepared to acknowledge that it may be my autistic traits that leave me so incredulous on observing others’ logical slips, but when the government announces on one day a plan to fluoridate water across the country, and goes on to denounce bottled water the next week, even such an advanced state of cynicism as my own is not sufficient to hold me back. Chemicals in food affect me to an extent I barely could have guessed just a few years ago when I was diagnosed, mistakenly it now seems, with Cyclothymia (manic depression lite). A few penny sweets see me throwing my mobile phone against walls in busy-brained exasperation, cheese and dairy, coffee, alcohol or gluten see my head fill with abstract anger and intrusive daydreams of, say, storming out of work and thieving my boss’s car to drive to the continent posting back vituperative postcards. Only recently have I started putting the pieces together (the telegrammatic version would see it described something like this: profligate use of antibiotics by doctors, and prophylactic use of same in the meat industry, fast baked bread with high levels of yeast and high-gluten strains of wheat plus a diet of refined carbohydrates leads to an imblance in gut flora and a leaky gut, which itself leads to improperly digested peptides intefering with brain function, casomorphin from milk protein being one such), consequently it is only recently that I have started to repair the damage with anti-fungals and probiotics, as a result of which my “ADHD” mind is clearer than it has been for years and my Aspergic traits less rainman than light intermittent drizzle. For this to happen, though, I have had to assiduously exclude from my diet practically anything which is not natural (excepting those supplements which would be unnecessary had I grown up on a more natural diet, but which address some of the problems caused by processed food). In my work with autistic and hyperactive students whose problems in so many respects echo my own, I see again and again that they, as I did, proactively, though unconsciously, seek those very substances which cause them problems just as heroin addict would seek a fix. Quite aside from restricting their diets to the substances such as gluten, dairy and orange which have most often been shown to correlate with symptoms in the opioid-excess theory of autism propounded by, for example, Sunderland University’s Autism Research Unit, they also very often eat toothpaste. Now, since the precautionary principle has been so beneficial in my consideration of my own diet, I believe it is necessary to take seriously the idea that fluoride – the one chemical guaranteed in any of the toothpastes these students eat – might be doing me as much harm as the cornish pasties laced with yeast extract I used to binge on. Since I live in a fluoridated area (The West Midlands) and know that, despite the disingenous statements of Labour Politicians I have heard, fluoride is not removed by domestic filtration systems, I have seen no alternative but to buy bottled water. It is with a heavy heart that I pack up those bottles and send them out with the bins to Dudley Council in order for them not recycle but burn (when I remember to do it at all with my foggy head), but I have to recognise that we live in unnatural times which turn our body systems against themselves and that it is not without a great deal of research and critical thinking that I have come to the conclusion that many of the mental illnesses flourishing in our society from childhood onwards are a result of the piecemeal agglomeration of the very thinking, more perfunctory and peremptory than it is logical, that has led us back to fluoridation with no more evidence: we have some of the worst food and some of the worstly behaved youths in Europe, if not the world and it is all as a result of such shoddy thinking which flies in the face of the precautionary principle. Incidentally, I wrote to my MP, Linda Waltho, about fluoridation over a year ago. She is yet to respond. Should she and her peers repeal this nonsense of compulsory “medication” by a medication less proven than any other in the history of medicine (proven medicines are in any case almost invariably proven in a dose-specific manner which makes me more cynical about the reasoning for fluoridation), I will stop this nonsense of buying bottled water. Should they not, I will see this as yet another example of Milton’s “They who put out the people’s eyes reproach them of their blindness.”