Date published: 2007/05/18
The BBC says:
Bread should be fortified with folic acid to reduce birth defects such as spina bifida, a watchdog says.
The recommendation was agreed by the Food Standards Agency and will now be passed to ministers for approval.
Research shows folic acid cuts the risk of neural tube defects, which affect hundreds of pregnancies a year.
But there is concern that adding the vitamin to bread could harm some elderly patients, as it could mask a deficiency in B12 vitamin.
In extreme cases, this can cause irreversible damage to the nervous system.
Folic acid is a source of folate, a vitamin found in broccoli, sprouts, peas, chickpeas, brown rice and fruit.
It is important for the development of the spine in the first stages of pregnancy and women are advised to eat extra folic acid when trying to get pregnant.
However, research suggests that only half of such women adhere to this advice.
Also, up to half of pregnancies are unplanned, meaning women may miss the opportunity.
Mandatory fortification has already been introduced in the US, Canada and Chile, where it cut defect rates by up to half.
The evidence has prompted the FSA board to agree to the measure after rejecting it five years ago.
...
The FSA board could not agree on whether folic acid should be added to bread or to flour, which would mean it would also be included in biscuits and cakes, although this technicality will be resolved next month.And it called for more debate on how products fortified with folic acid should be labelled.
Why is the majority having unrequired chemicals legally forced into its food just because a minority cannot seem to regulate their diet correctly? As even the FSA admits, folic acid has risks for other people, and no doubt more widely than the article states.
And if the government decides to require folic acid to be put into bread directly, rather than into flour, then is everyone who sells a loaf of bread at a school or church fair going to be liable to prosecution if they have not added folic acid (it is not exactly a common ingredient lying around household kitchens)?
It's amazing that the so-called organic food community has not complained about this proposal. They get hysterical about a few odd bits of extraneous DNA getting into their food, and here a completely arbitrary molecule is being added to food in non-trivial amounts.
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