The government has costed the benefit of fortification but ignored the harm Dr Clare Craig Key points ● The UK government model gives an expected benefit of fortification of 624 quality adjusted life years (QALYs) per year of fortification. ● Half of the harm from one problem – gestational […]
Posts
An Open Letter to a Fifth Prime Minister
An open letter to our new Prime Minister. Time to call a halt on the covid-19 boosters pending a full and independent investigation into the safety of the mRNA technology.
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 safe upper limit for a child aged one to three is 200 micrograms of folic acid a day. For an adult it is 1,000. The limit is precautionary because no safety trials have ever been done. At the […]
The AstraZeneca Files
Dr Ros Jones reviews information on AstraZeneca, from the children’s trials, to the disappearance and final withdrawal of this ‘British success story’
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
How does folate fare during a famine?
If folate deficiency at a population level increases the risk of Neural Tube Defects, what happens during a famine? Do the risks rise?
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?
