The Colgate Total toothpaste website states the following:

Colgate Total is the only toothpaste on the market that has undergone the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s rigorous New Drug Application (NDA) review process for efficacy and safety, including periodic reviews of scientific literature and safety information. . . . There are more published, peer-reviewed clinical studies of Colgate Total than of any other toothpaste in the world. The safety and efficacy of Colgate Total toothpaste is supported by more than 90 scientific studies, involving 20,000 people, as well as by a broad set of safety evaluations. A recent five-year clinical study, published in 2012, also affirms the safety of Colgate Total toothpaste.

But does this actually mean anything? Johnson & Johnson, another American multinational corporation which specializes in developing medical devices and selling pharmaceutical and consumer packaged goods, has been ordered to pay $72 million US dollars to the family of a woman whose death from ovarian cancer was linked to her decades-long use of the company’s talc-based Baby Powder and Shower. Approximately 1,000 more cases have been filed in Missouri state court, and another 200 in New Jersey. In this specific case, jurors found Johnson & Johnson liable for fraud, negligence, and conspiracy. You can read more about that here.

Even more alarming is the fact that the doctors who govern these peer-reviewed medical journals have spoken out a number of times on the unreliability of most published literature, which is dominated by corporate influence and scientific fraud. A common example we use here at CE is Dr. Richard Horton, who is currently the Editor-in-Chief of The Lancet, one of the most credible peer-reviewed medical journals in the world. He has explained in perfect detail the problems which plague scientific research today:

The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness. (source)

Arnold Seymour Relman, a Harvard Professor of Medicine and former Editor-in-Chief of The New England Medical Journal, offers further insight into the issue:

The medical profession is being bought by the pharmaceutical industry, not only in terms of the practice of medicine, but also in terms of teaching and research. The academic institutions of this country are allowing themselves to be paid agents of the pharmaceutical industry (source)(source)

Dr. Marcia Angell, a physician and the current Editor-in-Chief of The New England Medical Journal, also expresses these sentiments:

It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgement of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine. (source)

John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at Stanford University School of Medicine, published a study titled “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False” which explains the issue in detail. To this day, his paper is the most widely accessed article in the history of the Public Library of Science. And this was more than 10 years ago — the problem has clearly worsened in the intervening years.

There are countless other examples of insiders exposing these truths; as you can see, much of what these corporations say, and the scientific literature that they fund/publish, should be greeted with extreme caution.