Fluoride and the Skin Microbiome Hair Follicle Disaster

Part 2 "cut, fractured, deformed"

Hello Friends. In part one we went over the basics on how fluoride accumulates through the process of absorbing and adsorbing onto food and then into the body.

In this segment I will draw your attention to another obvious, but undiscussed source of fluoride uptake into the body’s tissues through the follicles of the skin, mouth, and colon. In each of these locations a series of ubiquitous changes begin that modifies expression.

Firstly we have to update our understanding of just how important follicles are to the normal fitness function of the skin in total and how that applies to the GI tract. The hair follicle is in fact a part of the multicomponent immune competent organ that functions on that outer skin surface and in the microenvironment of our internal fluidic epithelial terrain.

In this research from July 2024, “Hair follicles modulate skin barrier function”, we affirm four key discoveries that update our certainty on pathways and functions of specific follicle phenotypes during internal and external mutual component regulatory expressions.

“Our skin provides a protective barrier that shields us from our environment. Barrier function is typically associated with the interfollicular epidermis; however, whether hair follicles influence this process remains unclear. Here, we utilize a potent genetic tool to probe barrier function by conditionally ablating a quintessential epidermal barrier gene, Abca12, which is mutated in the most severe skin barrier disease, harlequin ichthyosis. With this tool, we deduced 4 ways by which hair follicles modulate skin barrier function.

1.      First, the upper hair follicle (uHF) forms a functioning barrier.

2.      Second, barrier disruption in the uHF elicits non-cell-autonomous responses in the epidermis.

3.      Third, deleting Abca12 in the uHF impairs desquamation and blocks sebum release.

4.      Finally, barrier perturbation causes uHF cells to move into the epidermis.

Neutralizing IL-17a, whose expression is enriched in the uHF, partially alleviated some disease phenotypes. Altogether, our findings implicate hair follicles as multi-faceted regulators of skin barrier function.”

Using this information, we need to reassess how cut or damaged follicles interact with fluoride.  Of the above examples damaging the “functional barrier” opens the organelle physically to an increased toxic sorbent load. As we all know, hopefully, the skin is the largest organ but the above requires some updating to our old ideas of our skin as simply a “brick wall” that just needs nutrients for fitness. Reading from this 2022 HealthLine article some basics emerge:

“Your skin is made up of layers, each of which performs important functions in protecting your body. The outermost layer, called the stratum corneum, is often described as a brick wall. It consists of tough skin cells called corneocytes that are bound together by mortar-like lipids. This is your skin barrier. Inside the skin cells, or “bricks,” you’ll find keratin and natural moisturizers. The lipid layer contains: cholesterol, fatty acids, ceramides. This fantastically thin brick wall is literally keeping you alive. Without it, various harmful environmental toxins and pathogens could penetrate your skin and cause adverse effects inside your body. Additionally, without your skin barrier, the water inside your body would escape and evaporate, leaving you completely dehydrated.” [2]

Interesting right? But let’s apply our new 2024 info and that this highlighted statement now becomes much more important to the fluoride hair follicle disaster because we have to consider leg/pubic shaving as creating artificial pores through the “brick wall”. Dehydration offers the gaseous vehicle for adsorption to the ruptured lipid bilayer forming diseased terrain.

Another factor that amplifies the malignance of the non-cell-autonomous responses are health products themselves working together to amplify the toxicity of fluoride. This “Toothpastes “article , from 1992, describes common product mixtures from the late 80’s with several now banned ingredients that we know now to bio amplify fluoride sorbtion through the teeth and onto the root follicles of damaged teeth.

“Toothpastes can be more or less oriented towards having a particular effect, such as cleaning, anticaries effect, antimicrobial effect or inhibition of the formation of tartar. Toothpastes contain substances which promote dental health, such as abrasives (silicium dioxide, brushite, calcite, calcite and aragonite, gibbsite etc.), active components (fluorides, triclosan, metal ions, sanguinarine and surface-active substances), substances which motivate the use of toothpaste (sweetening agents, aromatic oil, colours) and components which are necessary for technical reasons, such as moisturizing agents, binders and opacifiers.” [3]

The highlighted portions pose some potentially uncomfortable conclusions. In the coming parts I will focus on and show more fully how this access is genotoxic by disrupting enhancer binding protein c/EBP alpha that causes changes in the follicle keratin pattern and ultimately phenotype differentiation that is nonreversible. [4]

The genotoxic effects of fluoride extend their damaging touch to the follicles of the colon as well and dysregulates “desquamation and blocks sebum release” via shifting translation[1] from fluoride adsorption onto colon follicles. This cycle leads to auto immune dysbiosis because these malformed communicatory surface displays on commensal microbiota begin translating a damaged follicle phenotype in response adding to the overall dysregulation and disease state of the GI tract skin.

Colon microenvironment and microbiota dysbiosis are closely related to various human metabolic diseases. In this study, a total of 72 healthy female mice were exposed to fluoride (F) (0, 25, 50 and 100 mg/L F-) in drinking water for 70 days. The effect of F on intestinal barrier and the diversity and composition in colon microbiota have been evaluated. Meanwhile, the relationship among F-induced colon microbiota alterations and antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) expression and short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs) level also been assessed. The results suggested that F decreased the goblet cells number and glycoprotein expression in colon. And further high-throughput 16S rRNA gene sequencing result demonstrated that F exposure induced the diversity and community composition of colonic microbiota significantly changes. Linear Discriminant Analysis Effect Size (LEfSe) analysis identified 11 predominantly characteristic taxa which may be the biomarker in response to F exposure. F-induced intestinal microbiota perturbations lead to the significantly decreased SCFAs levels in colon. Immunofluorescence results showed that F increased the protein expression of interleukin-17A (IL-17A) and IL-22 (P < 0.01) and disturbed the expression of interleukin-17 receptor A (IL-17RA) and IL-22R (P < 0.05 or P < 0.01). In addition, the increased expression of IL-17A and IL-22 cooperatively enhanced the mRNA expression of AMPs which response to F-induced microbiota perturbations. Collectively, destroyed microenvironment and disturbed AMPs are the primary reason of microbiota dysbiosis in colon after F exposure.” [5]

As you can see not only is fluoride genotoxic it has caused direct disruption of translation between deformed follicles physically disturbing “the expression of interleukin-17 receptor A” machinery leading to a cancerous state and coopting the microbiome into a supporting dysbiosis.

I did not cover the follicles of the uterus and brain in this article as they deserve the next one. I know it seems like a lot of info to go over before the probiotic solution makes sense but I want to be very thorough. More to come.

Thank you for letting me show you in the first two segments how the fluoride hair follicle disaster is a real thing affecting millions of people.

[1] Hair follicles modulate skin barrier function

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38941190/

[2] What to Know About Your Skin Barrier and How to Protect It

https://www.healthline.com/health/skin-barrier

[3] Toothpastes

 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1592544/

[4] Sodium fluoride influences the expression of keratins in cultured keratinocytes

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20680429/

[5] Fluoride exposure cause colon microbiota dysbiosis by destroyed microenvironment and disturbed antimicrobial peptides expression in colon

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34673156/