- Santa Fe officially ended water fluoridation after its city council unanimously approved an ordinance change, which was signed into law in October.
- High costs were a major factor, as the city faced spending up to $600,000 to repair outdated fluoridation equipment, plus $40,000 annually to operate it.
- The decision was influenced by emerging health concerns, including a 2024 National Toxicology Program report linking fluoride exposure to lower IQ in children and the risk of dental fluorosis.
- The city’s action aligns with a broader national trend, following similar policy shifts in states like Utah and Oklahoma, which are also re-evaluating or banning the practice.
- Officials cited diminished benefits and a desire for consumer choice, noting that fluoride’s primary benefit is topical (like from toothpaste) and that removing it from water allows individuals to decide for themselves.
(Natural News)—In a decisive move that reflects a growing national skepticism, the city of Santa Fe in New Mexico has officially halted the decades-old practice of adding fluoride to its municipal water supply.
The city council unanimously approved the ordinance change in early October, with Mayor Alan Webber signing it into law on Oct. 15. This action driven by concerns over outdated standards, significant costs and emerging health research, positions the City Different among a rising number of municipalities questioning what was once considered a public health cornerstone.
For decades, fluoride has been widely added to public water supplies under the assumption that it prevents tooth decay and promotes overall dental health. However, recent studies and expert opinions have raised serious questions about its safety, challenging the very foundation of its widespread adoption.
A primary catalyst for Santa Fe’s shift was practical economics. Jesse Roach, the city’s interim public utilities director, revealed that the equipment required to add fluoride to the water had fallen into disrepair.
Upgrading this infrastructure would cost taxpayers between $400,000 and $600,000, with an additional annual operational cost of up to $40,000. This substantial financial burden forced city officials to weigh the practice’s purported benefits against its very real price tag.
From cavities to cognitive damage
Santa Fe’s old city code mandated fluoride levels between 0.8 and 1.2 parts per million (ppm) – a standard that became obsolete nearly a decade ago. Since 2015, federal guidance has recommended a lower level of approximately 0.7 ppm. Furthermore, Santa Fe’s water already contains naturally occurring fluoride, measuring between 0.3 and 0.6 ppm.
Officials concluded that pausing artificial fluoridation to monitor these natural levels was a prudent and scientifically sound course of action. Beyond cost and outdated codes, the council’s decision was influenced by a growing body of international research pointing to potential health risks. While low-level fluoride is acknowledged to strengthen tooth enamel topically, its systemic consumption has been linked to adverse effects, including dental fluorosis, a permanent staining and pitting of teeth.
Perhaps the most alarming area of modern research involves fluoride’s potential impact on the developing brain. A 2024 National Toxicology Program report found “moderate confidence” that fluoride exposure is linked to lower IQ in children.
Santa Fe’s official documents on the ordinance explicitly acknowledge this, stating that “additional investigation will be necessary to improve understanding of potential cognitive impacts,” signaling a major shift in the public policy conversation. This aligns with a recent federal court ruling that fluoride exposure at current U.S. levels poses an “unreasonable risk.”
The sudden fall of water fluoridation
The City Different is not an outlier, as its move mirrors a broader national trend. Utah passed a law earlier this year banning the practice outright, a significant victory for groups emphasizing individual liberty and local governance.
Similarly, Oklahoma. Gov. Kevin Stitt issued an executive order mandating a full review of fluoridation practices and directing state health agencies to stop endorsing it. The state’s health department quietly scrubbed its pro-fluoridation web pages, erasing claims that the chemical was “safe, cost-effective, and beneficial.”
Pro-fluoridation arguments often overlook a critical point: The widespread availability of fluoride in toothpaste and other dental products has significantly reduced the relative benefit of ingesting it through water. The primary benefit of fluoride is topical, meaning it works by direct contact with the surface of the teeth. Ingesting it systemically to prevent cavities is increasingly compared to swallowing sunscreen to prevent sunburn – an inefficient and potentially risky method of delivery.
Proponents of the ban frame it as a victory for consumer choice and bodily autonomy. By removing a mandatory medication from the public water supply, the city allows individuals to decide for themselves whether and how to consume fluoride. This empowers residents to make personal health decisions based on their own research and risk tolerance.
The new ordinance does not ignore fluoride entirely. The city is mandated to continue monitoring the naturally occurring fluoride levels in its water and report them in annual water quality reports. This data-driven approach provides a foundation for future decision-making, allowing the city to adapt its policies as new scientific evidence emerges.
“Years of heated discussions have raised concerns about fluoride being a potentially dangerous substance,” BrightU.AI‘s Enoch noted. “Authorities have also questioned the effectiveness of fluoridated water in preventing dental caries. This led to a recent policy shift to cease the practice, despite protests from some health advocates.”
Watch this video explaining where the fluoride in water comes from.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.