The government has costed the benefit of fortification but ignored the harm Dr Clare Craig Key points ● On the UK government’s calculations, corrected to the registry count of affected pregnancies, the health benefit of fortification is 624 quality adjusted life years (QALYs) per year of fortification. ● Half […]
Author: Clare Craig
The dose in the bottle
Does folic acid cause as well as complicate formula feeding? Dr Clare Craig The measurement of the effect of folic acid in pregnancy has been confined to neural tube defects but the effects are far wider. There are adverse effects in the mother with multiple births and with gestational diabetes, which tripled across the introduction […]
Diabetes in pregnancy tripled after Australia added folic acid to flour
Researchers asked for an urgent safety assessment Dr Clare Craig For close to seventeen years, folic acid has been added to almost all bread-making flour in Australia and eaten across the population. Britain has begun to do the same with a mandate from 13 December 2026. There has been only one randomised trial of a […]
What really causes neural tube defects?
The certainty with which neural tube defects are blamed on folate deficiency is misplaced Dr Clare Craig Mandatory fortification with folic acid depends on two beliefs. The first is that these defects arise because women do not get enough folate from their food. The second is that raising folate intake across the whole population will […]
Ireland Is Importing Britain’s Folic Acid Law
Ireland is being forced to copy undemocratic UK decision Dr Clare Craig On 13 July 2026, the Irish Minister for Public Health, Jennifer Murnane O’Connor, launched a public consultation on the mandatory fortification of non-wholemeal flour with folic acid. It closes on 5 October. The stated aim is to reduce neural tube defects (NTDs), a […]
Chapatti flour and the highest-risk women
Reaching the women most at risk Dr Clare Craig AMMENDMENT: N.B. This article has been edited. It had implied all chapatti flour (atta) was wholemeal which is wrong. Much of the atta sold in Britain is white or blended. The error came from mis-reading a December 2024 Lords debate. In answer to a question about […]
Dosage is key to efficacy, so why is it ignored for safety?
Smaller doses act differently to larger ones Dr Clare Craig Key points • The same molecule at different doses can produce different effects and sometimes opposite ones. • Regulators expect different efficacy by dose including non-linear dose responses • Safety assessment is built around finding the dose at which harm begins as the dose rises. […]
The children who pay the price
Children are the ones most likely to overdose on folic acid Dr Clare Craig Key points The upper limit for a child aged one to three is 200 micrograms of folic acid a day, scaled down from the adult figure. No safe upper level has ever been set. For an adult it is 1,000. The […]
Government reimagines dead babies as a benefit of folic acid exposure
When a claim becomes unfalsifiable it is no longer scientific Dr Clare Craig On 10 July 2026 Esther McVey asked the Department of Health and Social Care what assessment it had made of a 1997 Lancet paper by Ernest Hook and Andrew Czeizel. They tried to highlight the troubling possibility that the claimed reduction in […]
Folic acid and Cancer: the safety studies do not show what is claimed
Folic Acid is a building block for DNA and drives cell division. Will the proposed fortification of bread inadvertently increase cancer risks?
Reality behind the claim folic acid could “save 200 babies”
Modelling and false assumptions have led to an inflated number Dr Clare Craig Key points The government said fortification would “help avoid around 200” neural tube defects a year and that “hundreds more babies will be born healthy”. Of the “200”, only 31 are live births, about 28 would be children living with disability and […]
The NHS’s folic acid rewrite
What an FOI revealed Dr Clare Craig The NHS has altered its online advice as to who must avoid folic acid right before it is mandated in our staple foods. Internal records show a warning to people on dialysis was cut because staff found it “confusing”. A warning that people with heart stents must avoid […]
Some people should avoid folic acid but how?
Government response to folic acid petition Dr Clare Craig There have been two parliamentary petitions regarding folic acid. Both have received a response. The NHS advises many people to avoid folic acid. The government claims people can avoid it if they need to. That claim is provably untrue and the adverse effects of medicating the […]
Why can’t Public Health U-turn?
When experts recommended removal of fortifications from flour – nothing happened Dr Clare Craig The last time public health in the UK moved to keep flour pure was 1875. Ever since, there has been a push to add more and more to it. A serving scientist employed by Unilever was handed the chair of a […]
Prostate cancer: Why Jeremy Clarkson was well meaning but wrong
Don’t readily gamble when the consequence is impotence and incontinence Dr Clare Craig Introduction In June 2026, Jeremy Clarkson announced that he was in remission from prostate cancer and called himself the luckiest man alive. An aggressive tumour had been caught early the previous year, and a follow-up PSA test had come back clear. He […]
Vaccines are not a panacea
The shingles vaccine has not cured dementia Dr Clare Craig Vaccines are not a panacea The shingles vaccine has not cured dementia Over the past month, four studies have been read as showing that the shingles vaccine prevents, or even reverses, dementia. A national newspaper has turned that reading into advice. The advice is to […]
The Forgotten Medicine for ‘Russian Influenza’
Today historians debate whether Russian influenza (1889-1891) was caused by influenza virus or coronavirus. That is the wrong question. The more important question is what contemporary observers were saying about the medicines.
Supporting debate on folic acid in flour
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