Fluoride, Bromine & Iodine
These three elements have something in common, they are all halogens. This refers to their group in the periodic table:
I don't have much to say about the other three halogens: Chlorine, Astatine, Tennessine. Astatine is the rarest element naturally occuring on Earth because it has a half-life of only 8 hours, so wherever it appears, it won't stay for long, it'll decay into Bismuth or Polonium depending on environment.
Tennessine was discovered in 2016, and it is so unstable that it disappears in 20 - 50 milliseconds so.. yeah.
When you read the word Chlorine, you should imagine the smell from a swimming pool or bath house, because that's what it is. Commonly used as a disinfectant in water, it easily evaporates, causing the smell you're familiar with. This vapor is highly toxic and unfortunately it gets absorbed easily, through both skin and lungs. Chlorine is also commonly added to tap water, so this is another reason to have water filters not only for faucet but also for your shower & bath. Filters are very effective against chlorine. We should all appreciate chloride however, as all life depends upon it.
Now that we have the 'minor' halogens out of the way, let's get on to the impactful stuff..
Flouride
I bet you expect me to speculate about fluoride calcifying your pineal gland now, and while I think that may well be a meaningful point, there's no need to resort to conjecture, because the toxicity of flouride is very simple to understand.
As of September 2020, 75 studies have investigated the relationship between fluoride and IQ, and 67 of those studies found reduced IQ in humans, particularly in children[1]
There are 80+ animal studies showing that elevated fluoride exposure impairs cognition, learning and memory.[2]
Unfortunately, fluoridation continues everywhere: toothpaste, tap water (if you're unlucky), non-stick frying pans, glue, water-repellants, and countless more.
Even if you have a fluoride water filter, what do you think the animals in the food chain are drinking? Irrigation is also of course widespread practice in agriculture, so vegetarians are hit even harder, and even buying organic won't remedy it.
So, how much has fluoride exposure increased in society? When adult teeth grows during adolescence, the presence of excessive flouride will cause a condition called fluorosis which isn't dangerous but it's a very obvious: you have little white areas on your teeth, it often looks like some tiny pieces of white paper are placed on the teeth.
Since fluorisis can be self-diagnosed, cannot be missed, or misdiagnosed, it's a good metric to see how excessive fluoride exposure looks historically.
Uh oh. But.. Don't despair, you can get the fluoride out of your body with good nutrition. This article is not a blackpill. Keep reading!
Bromine
Bromine isn't as toxic as Fluoride is, but on the other hand it's much more common. Bromine, just like Fluoride, acts as an electric retardant, it prevents your neurons from communicating with each other[3]
For this reason, doctors used it as a sedative for manic & hyperactive patients. This was of course a horrible idea, akin to hitting someone in the head with a hammer to make them calm down.
When neurons cannot link properly, you obviously get mental health problems. Wikipedia says[4] that Bromine was directly causing 5-10% of psychiatric hospital admissions back in the day, when it was prescribed by doctors as a sedative. One of the diagnostic symptoms of clinical bromine toxicity is psychosis.
Unfortunately, bromine is still quite common, especially in the US, China and the Middle East.
There used to be potassium iodine in bread, but in the 1980s they replaced it with potassium bromate instead :(
Bromine is also commonly found in soda, fabrics, fabric softeners, pesticide, dyes, mattresses, furniture, car interiors, electronics, prescription drugs, cosmetics, and fire retardants.
Typical symptoms of bromine toxicity is brain fog, psychosis, seizures, delirium, headaches, fatigue, ataxia, memory loss and even the inability to walk. Not death, though!
Whenever you see something with brom-something in the ingredient list, stay away from it. The less bromine you have in the body, the better electricity will flow through your body. The same is likely true for Orgone / Chi as well.
Iodine
Iodine was discovered in 1811, when the chemist Bernard Courtois was searching for new ways to gather potassium and ammonium for explosives during the Napoleonic wars. Bernard burned the seaweed kelp, and unknowingly isolated iodine from the ashes, when he used sulfuric acid by mistake. Kelp has the highest concentration of iodine out of all known life forms, so he was able to see the violet vapor recrystallize. The name iodine comes from the Greek word iodes, which means purple.
Out of all the nutrients we know the human body requires, iodine is by far the heaviest one with an atomic mass of 127. The average body only contains 15-20mg iodine[6] which is the same amount found in one tablespoon of kelp!
30% of the body's iodine is found in the thyroid gland. Most research about iodine focuses on the thyroid for this reason.
The thyroid hormones are called T3 and T4 because of the number of iodine atoms they contain.
Iodine is essential in every metabolically active cell for regulation of enzymatic activity and protein synthesis.
Many children used to get really nasty symptoms of iodine deficiency back in the day, so they started adding iodine to table salt (which you absolutely should not consume btw, you should only eat real sea salt) which made the worst symptoms disappear. This extremely simple measure of iodine supplementation is heralded as one of the most successful public health measures that have ever been undertaken. Still today, most of the iodine people consume is from table salt, most of the rest is from seafood.
The average American has an iodine intake of 0.216 mg and the RDA is 0.220 mg. Wikipedia, journalists and other 'health authorities' would have you believe that iodine deficiency is rare. As usual, they are wrong. Their understanding of nutrition overall is whether or not you get sick enough to be hospitalized. There is literally no concept of health in modern healthcare. Just look at the food they give you at the hospitals, that should tell you everything.
Mainstream health authorities tell you that excessive iodine is more dangerous than any risk of deficiency, because it is rare, they say. They do not tell you that bromine & fluoride will inhibit your cells from absorbing iodine[7] thereby increasing our demand for iodine.
They do not mention that pesticides inhibits iodine[8] nor do they tell you that iodine in salt is unstable, so any exposure to air will deplete the salt of iodine. It takes 20-40 days for half of the iodine to disappear into the air[9]
Table salt is two things: Sodium Chloride and a tiny amount of Potassium Iodide. Since chlorine is also a halogen, it will compete with the iodine making this literally the worst way of supplementing iodine one could think of. It boggles the mind, how can it be that every mainstream health authority outrights lies about basically everything, and every measure for health seems to be the most potent ways to poison us? Vaccines, veganism, seed oils, there is too many examples to count.
While Wikipedia maintains that "the general US population has adequate iodine nutrition" millions of Americans are so iodine deficient that their thyroid hormone levels have declined to the level where they are clinically sick.
According to autopsies, more than 50% of the population has enlarged thyroid cells[6] also known as goiter, the #1 symptom of iodine deficiency.
What do doctors say about this? They maintain that goiter isn't something to worry about, unless you get cancer. They can't earn money from giving you the nutrients you need to fix your thyroid, but when you get cancer, they can earn money from you, so that's when they swing into action and get involved. Funny how that works, huh?
More importantly than any specific reduction of health into numbers, it seems like almost every American complains about their metabolism being shot to pieces.
This is not normal.
The dietary recommendations are meant to be sufficient at preventing goiter, but apparently it is not. Even if this wasn't the case, even if everyone's thyroid function was optimal, we would still benefit from a higher iodine intake because it reduces the levels of harmful bromine & fluoride.
One piece of the metabolic puzzle is iodine deficiency, another is displacement of iodine by fluoride & bromide, and a third piece is selenium deficiency.
It is important that you understand the entire puzzle before you try to solve it. This is not complicated, I believe that everything you need to know is in this article, so worst case, re-read it a couple times.
A study on thyroiditis found that the fluoride levels in your drinking water was twice as important as whether you had a family history of thyroiditis..! [10]
WHO has designated iodine deficiency the most preventable cause of mental retardation in the world.[11]
Iodine was the #1 prescribed medicine by doctors for almost a century: Megadoses of 50mg were commonly prescribed, which is more than twice the amount of iodine in the average American's entire body and this was done as a cure-all when they did not know what the underlying disease was, such is the potential upside of iodine.
Here's a quote from Albert Szent-Györgö, the Nobel Laureate who discovered Vitamin C:
"When I was a medical student, iodine in the form of KI [potassium iodide] was the universal medicine. Nobody knew what it did, but it did something and did something good. We students used to sum up the situation in this little rhyme:
"If ye don’t know where, what, and why
prescribe ye then K and I"
It was recently proven that iodine is an antioxidant[12] which may explain some of its medical efficacy. It is also an irritant, so don't take this as "iodine is automatically good".
Women have increased requirement for iodine, which is a big reason why women crave seafood more than men do. The reason for this are their breasts and fertility cycles: In the luteal phase, breasts can grow up to 15% after ovulation[13] which isn't swelling: it's cell proliferation. Since the breasts aren't supposed to get permanently bigger every menstrual cycle (imagine that!) the excess cells get cleared away with iodine.
When there isn't enough iodine available to clear away the surplus cells, benign cysts are formed! This is called fibrocystic breast changes.
90% OF AMERICAN WOMEN GET FIBROCYSTIC BREAST CHANGES[94]
100 years ago, only 3% of women had fibrocystic disease[14]
If you feed animals an iodine-free diet, they will develop fibrocystic disease[15] but when you supplement iodine, the changes are reversed[16]
Because of the fertility cycle, women are 5-10x more likely to develop thyroid problems which likely occurs because of insufficient iodine & required cofactors (selenium, magnesium, vitamin C and B-vitamins) being depleted by
In China, the traditional treatment against cysts in the breasts is to put seaweed on them, to absorb iodine through the skin.
Consuming seaweed is a potent way to consume iodine, as it contains low amounts of the co-factors required for iodine. After all, the seaweed is itself able to effectively use the extreme amounts of iodine it contains!
However, the seaweed isn't all you need: iodine in isolation is toxic for you. If you would eat a ton of seaweed, you would feel bad. The way to do it is to eat a tiny, tiny pinch of kelp daily, make sure you are getting enough co-factors (selenium and magnesium most importantly) and slowly increase the kelp dose as long as you feel good. Some people go absurdly high. You can find tons of people online who are eating 50mg per day (!) which as you might remember is more than twice as much as the typical human body contains. I don't recommend such drastic measures unless you truly know what you are doing.
Iodine can remove Fluoride & Bromine from your body!
This happens because they are all halogens, so they are chemically similar and thus compete for the same places in the body. This is a double-edged sword: when you take a large dose of iodine, then your body will be flooded with toxic bromine & flouride that were dumped out from the cells. This is good, because it allows you to get rid of them, but it will hurt you. The slower you go through this process of easing into iodine supplementation, the easier it is for the body to expel the toxins with minimal damage.
It is incredibly important that you understand that your body is filled with DECADES of fluoride and bromine accumulation. If you attempt to quickly detox this you may cause serious injury to yourself.
Increasing sea salt intake, and slightly more water (so you pee more) will help this detox process.
Iodine in itself bad if you don't have the nutrients your body requires as co-factors. The most important one is Selenium, which we will now discuss..
Selenium
The left picture shows the thyroid cells of normal rats. The middle picture are from rats who were subjected to extreme amounts of iodine. The right picture is extreme amounts of iodine and selenium.
Unless you're eating large amounts of seafood, lamb, grassfed beef, chicken or eggs; you're likely subclinically deficient in selenium. You need to make sure you're getting optimal amounts of selenium before you increase iodine intake.
One brazil nut provides 130% of the RDA for Selenium.
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