You know, if only they'd taken the time to ask me, I could have saved the Food Standards Agency an awful lot of time and money. I did a phenomenal dissertation for my degree on the pros and cons of folic acid fortification of flour, and concluded that it would be a very good thing, preventing not only many neural tube defects but also vascular disease, some cancers, some psychiatric disorders and some other congenital defects and with very little basis for the fear that it may mask B12 deficiency if doctors are given basic education on what to keep an eye open for.
It won me a prize for the best student project in the Biological Sciences in my year.
I could be a famous and celebrated nutritionist by now, but instead I am at home with my 2 girls.
I know which is best.
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8 comments:
Interesting.
Would you be concerned that it could have the opposite affect - that some women wouldn't bother taking any kind of supplement, "because it's in bread after all", and thus end up getting not enough that way because they don't eat enough bread?
you need hardly any though jax. and take up rate of floic acid preconception is really poor - you should take it ideally 3-ish months! I failed even knowing all the benefits as it took so v long to get pregnant!
It's mass medication though.
And I don't want to be mass-medicated. I'd like to make up my own mind about whether to take supplements, or any other medication, and I'd really rather not have a nanny-state doing that for me.
But it's not medication, it's food. It's replacing vitamin content that has been lost from our food through soil depletion, changes in varieties, intensive farming methods, early picking, long storage, etc etc. It's just reinstating what should have been there in the first place. And of course food has a medical effect .. that's what good health is.
And Jax, if I could find a complete copy of my original dissertation I could find out what sort of amounts would be ingested through fortification as opposed to supplementation, but if I can vaguely recall back 8 years I'm pretty sure it would do the trick even if they didn't supplement. And of course for the 50% of unplanned pregnancies who don't supplement anyway it would only be a good thing.
If it's food, then we should have the choice about whether to eat it. If it's added to another food (and particularly a food as basic as bread and flour), we're being forced to have it whether we want it or not.
I'm not debating the pros and cons of FA - though I am not convinced the situation wrt prenatal FA is as cut-and-dried as it appears - I am saying that I am the one who is responsible for my health, for what goes in my mouth and my body. Not the government.
i guess joannas blog not the place to argue, so I will just say i'm a believer, and let it rest!
So, Deb, eat wholemeal bread which will not be fortified - it doesn't need to be as it is naturally rich in folate. You do still have the choice. And the 700+ babies in the UK that will be born each year with an intact spine and back, let alone the 13000+ people who will not die of heart disease each year and the thousands who will avoid cervical, bronchial, oral and colorectal cancers (etc, etc) will assure you that it is worth it.
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