Articles about Vitamins

FDA mandated folic acid supplementation in white flour prevents heart disease and strokes, but not intentionally

A new study has discovered that enriching white flour with folic acid appears to be responsible for reducing not only birth defects, but strokes, too. There's a lot to cover here, so prepare for some interesting reading. First there's the fact that white flour is a metabolic disruptor, meaning that it promotes chronic disease when consumed by humans. That's because wheat berries are stripped of practically all their nutrition (fiber, healthy oils, vitamins and minerals) during processing, resulting in a nutritionally depleted (but high-calorie) substance used in cereals, crackers, cookies, pasta, and other foods.

Years ago, it was discovered that consuming this white flour caused birth defects and other nutritional deficiency diseases such as beriberi or rickets, so the FDA mandated that all white flour be "enriched" with a tiny amount of folic acid and other B vitamins in order to prevent these more obvious and horrifying disorders. But the FDA never mandated that the rest of the nutrition be put back into the white flour, leading to the unfortunate reality that today's white flour products are highly deficient in important minerals like magnesium and zinc. These minerals deficiencies are also strongly correlated with various diseases, yet those diseases are not so visible and horrifying (like birth defects), so there's no outcry to fortify white flour with a broader spectrum of minerals.

Now here's the interesting part: when folic acid was added to white flour, rates of heart attacks, strokes and birth defects suddenly dropped. This is all from adding a very small amount of folic acid to the food supply, and the research suggests that there are now 48,000 fewer deaths each year from these disease due to the folic acid supplementation.

If folic acid is so good for people, why doesn't the FDA require more folic acid to be added? Further, why doesn't the FDA require magnesium and zinc be added back to the white flour? The combination of folic acid, magnesium and zinc would have a far-reaching, positive impact on the health of U.S. citizens. The answer, of course, is well known to regular readers of this site: if the FDA made the food supply any healthier, people would need fewer prescription drugs and drug company profits would suffer. In other words, keeping people sick is good for the drug business. Skeptical? It is well established that one of the FDA's primary missions is to protect drug company profits (just look at their policy on drugs from Canada, for one thing), and this isn't surprising since so many FDA employees are ex-drug industry executives.

When it comes to folic acid supplementation, the FDA is merely covering its backside on the more obvious and horrifying nutritional deficiencies. The local TV news station showing a disfigured infant born with spina bifida is an ugly sight... the kind of sight that gets people outraged. The FDA doesn't want that, so they make sure the national food supply will, at minimum, prevent those obvious birth defects. But other disease like cancer, heart disease and diabetes are not so visible. You can't show "diabetes" on the evening news, since a diabetic patient looks like everyone else. It is well known that white flour promotes diabetes, yet the FDA does nothing to mandate the enrichment of white flour with vitamins and minerals that would help diabetic patients (chromium, for example, is a trace mineral that helps regulate blood sugar and insulin sensitivity).

Frankly, if the FDA were really looking out for the health of the public, they would outright ban white flour and require all flour products to be made from the whole grain. The resulting health benefits would be far-reaching and dramatic.

There's one more thing about this article that amazes me: De. Robert Eckel is chairman of the American Heart Association's Council on Nutrition, Physical Activity and Metabolism. Sounds important, huh? You'd think a person in this position would be schooled on basic nutrition, right? Yet Dr. Eckel is quoted in this story as saying, "There is no proof that [supplements] are beneficial." Huh? He's saying that there's no proof nutritional supplements do anything to enhance heart health. Where has this guy been for the last fifteen years? The journals are flowing over with study after study showing strong, positive health results from nutritional supplementation.

And it goes far beyond just folic acid, too: there's flax oil supplements, mineral supplements, herbal supplements, homeopathic medicine, and a long list of vitamins that have all been strongly correlated with reduced rates of heart disease. That the lead nutritional expert at the American Heart Association is unaware of these studies is nothing short of astounding... but perhaps not that surprising. The AHA, as you probably know, is hardly versed in nutritional theory. It seems to operate in league with the FDA and AMA: always discrediting nutritional supplements while hyping up the latest prescription drug. The AHA is just another cog in the grand racket known as organized medicine: a health scam of unprecedented influence that primarily seeks to extract dollars from the national economy while limiting patients' access to any form of nutritional or medical therapy outside the control of Western medicine.

Tell you what: if you want good nutritional advice, don't listen to the AHA. They've missed the mark time and time again, and for decades, the organization actually advised heart patients to eat extremely low-fat, high-sugar diets! I know older heart patients today who are still eating fewer than 10g of fat each day while consuming unlimited quantities of refined, processed carbohydrates -- and it's all fully supported by their doctors who apparently stopped learning anything new about about health and nutrition in the 1970's. Go figure...

Overview:

Flour enriched with the vitamin folate to prevent birth defects may also be preventing tens of thousands of deaths in the United States from heart attack and stroke, according to a provocative new government study released Friday in San Francisco.

Using a computer analysis of death certificates, researchers at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention detected a sudden drop in mortality rates from heart attack and stroke that coincides with the required addition of folate to the nation's food supply beginning in 1996.

Last month, a team led by Wake Forest University researchers reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association that high doses of folic acid, vitamin B6 and B12 did not reduce the risk of a second stroke in patients who had already suffered one.

Source: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/03/06/MNGU05FM 9P1.DTL