Why do so many supermarket foods contain folic acid now ?

[iphammer]

Today I went to Sainsbury’s for the weekly shop and for the first time I started looking at the ingredients in some of these foods.

My plan was to buy pizza , pies and a quiche along with a load of other bits which I eventually bought however I didn’t buy the pizza , pies and quiche as I was surprised to see they had folic acid in them. Why does the majority of foods now contain folic acid and why don’t they tell us how much folic acid is in the recipe?

higgidy products is just 1 company out of 100s showing it in there food

looking on the nhs website this is what it says it is quite scary..

Like all medicines, folic acid can cause side effects, although not everyone gets them.
Possible side effects of folic acid include:

• bloating
• farting (flatulence)
• feeling sick (nausea)
• loss of appetite

Who can and cannot take folic acid
Most adults and children over 12 months can take folic acid tablets or liquid on their own.
Multivitamins containing other vitamins combined with folic acid are not recommended for children under 12 years of age.
Folic acid tablets and liquid are not suitable for everyone. For example, they may not be suitable if:

• you've had an allergic reaction to folic acid or another ingredient used in the medicine in the past
• you have vitamin B12 deficiency anaemia or pernicious anaemia (a condition where your immune system attacks your body's healthy cells)

you have a coronary stent

So interesting that OP randomly noticed this on her shop rather than, for example, being one of the many Facebook conspiracy theorists who've decided that folic acid is the next MMR/raw milk/covid vax bugbear.
Before taking health advice from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. do bear in mind that a worm ate part of his brain.

Hey but sometimes I get peckish 😂

Then I have good news for you, you can have 6 family sized garlic breads and stay within the safe dose!

To prevent spina bifida.

Hasn't it actually been required as an additive to white flour for decades already? But not to wholemeal flour. Because that naturally contains some folic acid in the husk of the wheat (which is removed when wholegrain wheat is processed into white flour). So the idea is just to replace the vitamins that were removed. This has been my understanding although I can't remember where it came from.

Nevertheless I've been seeing folic acid and thiamin etc on ingredients lists for white flour for my whole life.

Has there been a recent change in the law regarding this?

To prevent spina bifida in how many births? Let's say 200 births a year so we then medicate, without consent, 65million people? The government does not have the right to medicate the nation and in such a way that it is impossible to measure how much you are consuming.

Of course, good news! I'd have to eat lots of pizza to be affected? What a shame flour is in everything.

Glad you're enjoying mocking my concerns. I have a serious health condition, listed by the NHS as one of the many issues where taking folic acid is a risk. Still, pizzas, eh? Fun!

You'd have to eat a lot of flour (which is, btw, not in "everything"). More than you could possibly eat in a day. And you'd have to eat that not only on a single 20 pizza binge day of madness, but every day. Your diet is far more likely to kill you if you're eating anything approaching that much flour.

You know you have the deficiency you have. Presumably you have tests to check up on it. Those tests will tell you if you have that deficiency or not. Folic acid won't make a difference to the accuracy of those tests. But it might save thousands of little babies from massive suffering.

214,000 to 322,000 pregnancies affected by neural tube defects worldwide each year,

It’s not impossible to know how much folic acid you are consuming, you have to eat 2kg of fortified flour a day to go over the limit that the article you shared says is safe. You know that you aren’t eating 2kg of flour a day because it’s a ridiculous amount.

You know you aren’t eating 3 1/2 loaves of bread, or 8 large pizzas, or 250 cream crackers or any combination of flour based foods that comes close to that amount and if you were you would have bigger things to worry about.

I think your missing the point, it's actually in flour. If you look at the ingredients of Sainsbury's own brand plain flour, Folic Acid is listed. It's not listed as an ingredient in Home Prides flour though

It isn't usually in wholemeal flour though, only white flour. If you can find products that are 100% wholegrain then I think you will avoid it, if it bothers you.

This is another example of fortification with unseen consequences. For someone with haemochromatosis, trying to avoid iron fortified products is an ongoing chore