Vitamin Trader - Healthy Discounts on Quality Vitamins

Most people have heard that women who take folic acid supplements before pregnancy can lower the baby's risk of the devastating birth defect spina bifida. Spina bifida children are often born paralyzed because the nerve cells that form their spinal cords are damaged.

Less well known is that folic acid helps prevent heart attacks, stroke and, possibly, cancer.

The problem is not simply that people don't eat enough folic acid-rich vegetables and fruit, although that's certainly true. What is more problematic is that many of us are biochemically programmed to need extra folic acid for our metabolic pathways.

For example, a 1995 study published in The Lancet showed that many women who have spina bifida babies may have a defective enzyme that normally requires folic acid to work. When the enzyme is weak, it needs more folic acid than usual to do its job - converting the amino acid homocysteine into another amino acid, methionine. The body needs methionine to manufacture nerve cells. Too little methionine available during pregnancy can have devastating effects on fetal nerve-cell development.

Enzymes that depend on folic acid have other roles as well. If these enzymes are weak, homocysteine levels rise to potentially toxic levels. Researchers at Harvard Medical School, in Cambridge, Mass., report that men who have high homocysteine blood levels run nearly three times the risk of heart attack as those whose homocysteine levels are low.

Tufts Medical School researchers in Boston have found that as blood homocysteine levels increase, both men and women are more likely to develop arteriosclerosis or narrowing of the carotid artery, the main artery in the neck.

Folic acid's ability to prevent a certain type of cancer was suggested in a 1993 animal study published in Cancer. Researchers found that abnormal cell growth in the respiratory tract associated with pulmonary carcinogenesis was reduced or prevented by increasing folic acid intake.

Your physician can test your folic acid metabolism by measuring your fasting blood level of homocysteine. High homocysteine usually indicates less than optimum folic acid metabolism. This happens because you are not eating well or because your key enzymes are in trouble. In both instances, you may require extra folic acid. Not enough vitamin B12 or vitamin B6 can also raise homocysteine levels. In 90 percent of people, high homocysteine levels can be corrected by a simple combination of 1 mg each day of folic acid (2.5 times the RDA), 10 mg of vitamin B 6 (5 times the RDA) and 0.4 mg vitamin B 12 (8 times the RDA).

Caution: People who have too little vitamin B 12 can be harmed by taking extra folic acid. Therefore, always take vitamin B 12 if you are supplementing folic acid. Anyone considering more than 1 mg daily of folic acid should first measure their blood level of homocysteine and a methyl malonic acid sensitive test for vitamin B 12 . Definitely have your customers talk to their physicians if they are interested in folic acid. Whether or not the doctors "believe" in medical nutrition, knowing that their patients are interested motivates them to learn more about it.

For further research, I've included recent scientific references. If your local hospital's medical library does not have these articles, the librarian can easily obtain a copy through the federal government's National Library of Medicine.

Richard Podell, M.D., M.P.H., is clinical professor, Department of Family Medicine at New Jersey's UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School.