14 DAY TRIAL // You can eat as much meat, green vegetables, fruit, whole grains as you want, but it seems that even so there is not enough folic acid (vitamin B9) for a pregnant mother and the child she's carrying.
A team led by Dr. Philippe De Wals of Universit? Laval's Department of Social and Preventive Medicine has shown that the addition of folic acid to flours has induced a 46% decrease of the cases of congenital neural tube deformation (especially anencephaly and spina bifida) in Canada. These conditions lead to major health problems, from physical and learning disabilities to the state of a "vegetable", as the neural tube develops the nervous system.
Lack of folic acid has been correlated with poor development of the neural tube. Before 1998, Canadian medical doctors were already recommending for women in their child-bearing years the consumption of vitamin supplements containing vitamin B9. "Canada decided to add folic acid to all flour produced in the country because formation of the neural tube in embryos is particularly intense during the first four weeks of pregnancy, which is before a lot of women even know they're pregnant. Since half of Canadian pregnancies are unplanned and the human body can't store folic acid, it is better to integrate folic acid into the food chain than to focus exclusively on taking vitamin supplements," stated De Wals.
De Wals' team assessed the rate of neural tube deformations before and after the introduction of folic acid-enriched flours in the case of more than 2 million Canadian births. If between 1993 and 1997, the rate was 1.58 per 1,000 births, this dropped between 2000 and 2002 by 46% to 0.86.
The highest improvement took place in the Canadian provinces with the highest rates of neural tube deformation before 1998: Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia. In Qu?bec, the decrease was also significant, but closer to the Canadian average.
For the moment, only Canada, US and Chile require vitamin B9 to be added to flour. The new research could encourage other countries, too, to do this.
Annually, about 200,000 cases of spina bifida and anencephaly are registered around the globe. The folic acid added to food could cut off that level by half.