The model behind the mandate Dr Clare Craig Multiple countries have already added folic acid to their food but the decisions differ in terms of the dosage and the types of food affected. Country Minimum Maximum What the law covers Can it be avoided? United States 154 µg/100 g none only flour and grain products […]
folic acid
The fall before folic acid
Neural tube defects in England and Wales fell dramatically from the 1960s to around 1990 then plateaued. Why? Dr Clare Craig Key points Total NTD pregnancy prevalence in England and Wales fell from 3.7 per 1,000 births in 1964 to 1.6 per 1,000 in 1990, a fall of 57 percent. From 1990 to 2004 the […]
Half of just one measured harm would cancel any claimed benefit from folic acid
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 […]
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 […]
Hunting for evidence of folate deficiency as a cause of neural tube defects
Examining the evidence for a link between folate deficiency and neural tube defects. Wthout this, a total population folic acid supplement is on very shake ground, even without considering potential harms.
Letter re Folic acid to the Secretary of State
HART & UKMFA letter to Secretary of State re mandatory folic acid fortification has yielded the usual bland reply with no resposne to any of our specific concerns. So no surprises there
Mandatory Folic acid supplements
a summary of all the evidence against the government’s decision for mandatory folic acid in all flour.
Finding the missing flour
Another detail of the government errors in the mandatory folic acid flour fortifiction policy. They don’t even know how much flour the public consumes so how can they work out how much folic acid we will be gettimg?
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?
Australia added folic acid to flour in 2009 then went silent about the results
More problems with the data purporting to support mandatory folic acid fortification of all flour. Australia introduced folic acid fortification in 2009. The following year there was a fall just below the trend line but where has the data been since?
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 […]
