Comment by aziaziazi
21 days ago
I never heard of that supplement (not a father) and was very surprised to find 80 countries mandate it. I checked the list (below) and it turns out the 80 countries are a bunch of poor nations plus USA, UAE, Qatar, Canada and Australia. I guess our medicare system supports the EU mothers fine enough so we don’t need to put that in the staple of food.
Or you have just been sweeping preventable birth defects under the rug. The UK determined that had been happening and are going to start doing it.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c206d60xe7no
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8264257/
2023 Study:
"Despite Public Health Initiatives across Europe recommending that women take 0.4 mg folic acid before becoming pregnant and during the first trimester, the prevalence of NTD pregnancies has not materially decreased in the EU since 1998, in contrast to the dramatic fall observed in the USA. This study aimed to estimate the number of NTD pregnancies that would have been prevented if flour had been fortified with folic acid in Europe from 1998 as it had been in the USA."
"Conclusions: This study suggests that failure to implement mandatory folic acid fortification in the 28 European countries has caused, and continues to cause, neural tube defects to occur in almost 1,000 pregnancies every year."
The most famous NTD is Spina Bifida, and most of them aren't really fixable by modern health care. So this is 1000 babies a year who are either born with severe birth defects, or, in what I'm guessing is many cases, terminated when they could have been born healthy with a flour enrichment mandate.
It would be interesting to know why EU countries chose not to mandate it. Also, I wonder if EU flour millers/producers add it voluntarily, and whether flour produced in Canada destined for EU markets leaves out the folate that's mandated for inclusion in the Canadian market.