"And this bizarre story begins at phosphate mining companies. Phosphate is an important mineral used in fertilizers. It's mined from natural rock deposits scattered across the world, and the phosphate rock is then refined to produce phosphoric acid. If that name sounds familiar, that's because it's one of the main ingredients in carbonated sodas such as Coke and Pepsi. Phosphoric acid is often compared to battery acid. It's a highly acidic liquid that is believed to be the primary reason why drinking sodas can result in kidney stones and a loss of bone mineral density.

Phosphate rock is also used to create fertilizers. The problem is, phosphate is often contaminated with high levels of fluoride -- as much as 40,000 parts per million, or up to 4% of the raw ore. To remove the fluoride, sulfuric acid is added to a wet slurry of phosphate and water. This causes the fluoride to vaporize, creating highly toxic gaseous compounds such as hydrogen fluoride and silicon tetrafluoride.

These toxic fluoride chemicals used to be released directly from the smokestacks of phosphate mining operations, but the nearby farms suffered devastating losses of cattle and food crops which withered away and died due to... guess what? Fluoride poisoning.

In order to stop this environmental destruction, the phosphate mining industry put in place a way to capture the toxic fluoride chemical vapors so that they wouldn't be released into the air and kill the surrounding livestock and vegetation. This was accomplished by installing "wet scrubbers" that captured the toxic fluoride chemicals, preventing them from being released into the environment and killing the plant and animal life living nearby.

It is from these wet scrubbers that toxic fluoride chemicals are now harvested. They're collected, re-packaged, shipped to your local city, then dumped into the municipal water supply. So instead of these toxic fluoride chemicals being released by the phosphate mining smokestacks, they are instead captured, and then released into the water supply of large cities where the chemicals then contaminate the water of millions of people at a time.

This is called water fluoridation."