17/07/2026
It's something I've been keeping an eye on since finding out about new legislation regarding adding folic acid to flour, and the flawed science it's based on.
Dogs First provides a very informative article.
We eat very little bread in our house, but probably more processed food than we should, due to time constraints and for convenience. Pies, pizzas, cookies, biscuits, anything made with white flour - it's fortified, there is no choice.
I am not too concerned for myself (not planning any more children), but there is no regard for how long term exposure to this synthetic version of folate will affect children and MEN (no mention of males in any of the studies quoted below).
It's ironic that when I was pregnant (12 years go), it wasn't until 2nd trimester that any health professional / midwife asked me if I was taking folic acid tablets. I didn't know I was supposed to, now I'm glad that I didn't.
VERY IMPORTANT HUMAN NUTRITION (BUT ALSO PET) RELATED POST GUYS, I URGE THE PREGNANT AMONG YOU TO TAKE HEED...
There's something happening in human nutrition at the moment that we, particularly the pregnant among us, need to be aware of.
While this post is human-related, the correlation to pets eating synthetic pet food is too obvious to ignore.
It's regarding the recent government announcement that they are soon to be making mandatory the addition of folic acid to non-wholemeal flour by the end of 2026 in order prevent birth defects in children.
www. gov. uk/government/news/birth-defects-prevented-by-fortifying-flour-with-folic-acid
This means, by 2027, UK residents will be unable to make white bread that DOES NOT contain folic acid.
(EDIT: Apparently an exemption is being made for mills making less than 500tonnes of flour!)
Not that this is limited to bread. Today, folic acid is added to a huge variety of products on the shelf, even organic sausages.
So what's the beef?
The UK government states that this move will prevent 200 birth defects in the UK each year.
A noble cause, we're all agreed.
Here's what's not mentioned:
FOLIC ACID is the synthetic version of the natural vitamin FOLATE (B9). These are NOT the same thing.
To use folic acid, our bodies have to go through a number of processes to make it bioavailable.
When you consume the normal food version (folate, I'm going to keep drilling this in), your body happily metabolises the compound, expelling much of what it doesn't need (only the fat-soluble vitamins are stored - A, D, E, K, albeit some folate is stored around the body).
This is NOT the case with folic acid.
Much like non-food iodide and copper sulphate that are added to stall-fed cattle and poultry grain (and pet food), these rapidly absorbed synthetic versions can concentrate in the animal's tissues (one of the main risk factors for dogs eating their livers developing "copper storage" disease). When you supplement a population with folic acid, their blood levels of unmetabolised folic acid will RISE.
The UK government's move is based on 5 randomised controlled trials.
4 of those were in already at-risk women, meaning women who had already had a baby with a neural-tube defect. Giving these women a high-dose of this drug (folic acid) thereafter reduced the chances of neural tube defects in their subsequent children.
There was only one trial in women who were NOT at risk. One trial.
The participants were given a dosage similar to what the UK government is recommending to give during pregnancy (a multivitamin containing 0.8 mg folic acid, which is twice the current UK recommended dose for non-at-risk folk but increasingly comparable with the new changes coming in).
They found that there were zero neural-tube defects among 2,471 offspring in the multivitamin group versus 6 among 2,391 controls.
Good news so far, and it's these results that the UK government are running with.
REF: Czeizel AE, Dudás I. Prevention of the first occurrence of neural-tube defects by periconceptional vitamin supplementation. New England Journal of Medicine. 1992;327:1832–1835.
What they're neglecting to mention is that the SAME AUTHORS brought out a subsequent paper two years later following the SAME PARTICIPANTS, highlighting that there were more than EIGHT SPONTANEOUS MISCARRIAGES in the treatment group for every one neural tube defect prevented.
Hmmmm.
REF Czeizel AE, Dudás I, Métneki J. Pregnancy outcomes in a randomised controlled trial of periconceptional multivitamin supplementation: final report. Archives of Gynecology and Obstetrics. 1994;255:131–139.
Specifically, they found 301 spontaneous miscarriages among 2,819 confirmed pregnancies allocated to multivitamins versus 251 among 2,683 controls. That is a crude excess of 50 recognised miscarriages (dividing 50 by the six NTD cases avoided gives 8.3 additional recognised miscarriages per NTD case avoided).
Now, it's important to note that, due to the small sample size, this was not found to be statistically significant, but it was very close (P value 0.1, meaning 90% confidence. We must be 95% certain for it to be considered "significant").
This means the authors did / could not conclude that supplementation killed babies.
And it's also worth noting the intervention was a multivitamin containing folic acid, iron, vitamins A, D, E, B vitamins and other nutrients—not folic acid alone.
But as a baby-having family, my ears were most certainly pricked at this discovery, particularly when rat studies, using the SAME DOSAGE of just folic acid alone, have detected birth irregularities such as smaller foetuses, impaired protein utilisation, and altered gestational development (albeit no notable infant death).
Far more worryingly, when they supplement rodents with the HIGHER DOSE (10x) recommended currently for at-risk women, the figures are alarming. They detected:
- More embryonic loss
- More delayed embryos
- Reduced embryonic length
- Thinner ventricular heart walls
- More ventricular septal defects
What is thought to be happening is that in some individuals, folic acid is blocking the uptake of the natural version of B9 (folate) for an unknown period of time and it's this "period of time" without B9 that is causing the problems in foetuses.
The authors concluded that even “moderately high” folic acid supplementation could adversely affect embryonic development in mice with reduced activity of the MTHFR gene.
THIS is the crux of it.
It suggests that GENETIC DIFFERENCES in folate metabolism influence your susceptibility to folic acid and these genetic differences in folate metabolism are well established in females, be they rat or human.
In fact, around 40% of women carry at least one C677T variant, which results in a small reduction in activity but 10–15% of you have the C677T TT genotype, which is associated with the greatest reduction in MTHFR activity.
Can you imagine if the above trial was conducted in this isolated cohort of women?!!
Guys, we need to be EXTREMELY CAREFUL with policies legalising the mass dosing of synthetic folic acid to women, particularly that 10-15% group.
While you and your family are free to consume what you like, that's your prerogative, but I don't feel it's fair to force everyone to go along with it.
I want to avoid folic acid in my diet (your dry-fed pets can't, albeit we have no canine data yet to work with). If you do too, please sign the petition to counter this most recent insanity.
www.petition.parliament. uk/petitions/769589
(Links broken on purpose as FB penalises links away)
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Some of the foods highest in folate are legumes like lentils and beans, veg like spinach and asparagus, and meat additions like liver.
If your doctor is recommending folate supplementation, they are highly unlikely to be aware of the difference between folic acid and true folate above. Know that METHYL-folate is the more natural form that your body prefers. However, as it degrades quicker in supplements and products, it makes dosing harder for companies (oh, and it's more expensive, nothing to do with it of course...).
The vets recommend Cobalaplex for B vitamin supplementation. It contains folic acid. I only discovered this last week. Annoyed at myself for not checking (apologies to clients).
Thanks John Cambell for highlighting this to me. Most of the above has been taken from his video "Folic Acid Dangers". You can find it on Youtube.
