The data on fluoride levels in Irish food were published by the Food Safety Authority of Ireland (FSAI) in their Total Diet Study in 2011. According to the FSAI, this study “sought to quantify exposure of people in Ireland to a number of chemical substances in food. Fluoride was selected as one of these substances due to its addition to drinking water under Irish law”.

Scientist Declan Waugh insists that the fluoride figures are wildly inaccurate (see main article). As part of our ongoing investigation into the effects of mandatory fluoridation, Hot Press has also examined the data. In an attempt to understand them more fully, we put a series of questions to the FSAI, focussing in particular on what the Total Diet Study says about fluoride levels in Irish foodstuffs and beverages.
Some of the answers provided to us are deeply unsettling.
Most immediately, the FSAI has made the astonishing admission to Hot Press that “the food samples for that part of the study were collected in 2002/3”. The survey was therefore between eight and nine years out of date when it was published.
According to the FSAI, the food samples were sent to the UK to be analysed under contract by the Food and Environment Research Agency laboratory in York.
Under persistent questioning from both Hot Press and scientist Declan Waugh, in a remarkable about-turn, the FSAI have now acknowledged the need for an up-to-date Total Diet Study based on the analysis of current food and drink samples.
In an official response to questions submitted by Hot Press, the FSAI stated: “The important thing for consumer protection is to measure current exposure to fluoride which has no doubt changed since 2002/3… The FSAI is in the process of doing a second up to date total diet study in which we will measure the fluoride content of food today using today’s food consumption patterns.”
Coming just two years after their 2011 study was published, it is a very strange statement, which nonetheless leaves two vital questions unanswered: what can have been the point of publishing a study in 2011 using food samples that were up to 9 years out of date? And is this the way in which the Food Safety Authority of Ireland should be conducting its business?
As we will reveal, this is not the only extraordinary anomaly that has emerged during the course of the Hot Press investigation. We intend to continue our efforts to get to the truth about just how much fluoride Irish people are being exposed to through our diet. And we also aim to establish how and why there are such apparently extraordinary discrepancies, in relation to fluoride levels in particular foodstuffs, between the surveys carried out for the FSAI and other international studies.

A full up-to-date report will be published in the next issue of Hot Press.