Articles about Vitamins

More women of childbearing age now take folic acid supplements to prevent birth defects

To learn more on this topic, be sure to also read the related article, Doctors mislead the public with low-carb diet warning about folic acid.

Overview:

Forty percent now take the vitamin that can prevent birth defects, a new March of Dimes survey finds.

Forty percent of American women of childbearing age now get enough folic acid to help prevent birth defects, according to a new March of Dimes survey.

"We're still only at 40 percent, but that's a lot better [than in past years]," said Dr. Siobhan Dolan, associate medical director for the organization.
The Gallup survey was conducted for the March of Dimes and funded through a grant from the CDC.

The results appear in the Sept. 17 issue of Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, a CDC publication.

Pollsters asked a national sample of 2,012 women aged 18 to 45 about their vitamin use, why they did or didn't take folic acid, and about their awareness of the importance of folic acid to prevent birth defects, among other questions.

While 40 percent of women now take folic acid daily in the form of multivitamins, just 28 percent did in 1995 and 32 percent did in 2003.
"We had concerns that low-carb diets might put women in a position where they didn't benefit from fortification in the food supply," she said, referring to low-carb dieters' habit of cutting down on or eliminating breads and other carbohydrate-rich foods.

In the new survey, 49 percent of women who said they'd been on a low-carb diet in the past six months said they took a multivitamin every day with folic acid.

"We still have quite a long way to go before the vast majority of women begin to take folic acid in preparation for pregnancy," Cullins said.
Women should increase their consumption of a variety of foods enriched with folate, she said.

That way, if a woman got pregnant while on the pill -- which is unlikely but can happen she would have gotten enough folic acid, Cullins said.

Source: http://www.healthcentral.com/news/NewsFullText.cfm?id=521248