Hesitation in the Health Sector costs lives!
June 2, 2003
According to the British Medical Journal thousands of deaths in Denmark are due to the authorities not being willing to take the available documentation on folic acid into account.
350,000 deaths due to cardiovascular disease could have been avoided the last ten years if the British authorities had used the available knowledge about the effect of folic acid, according to the British Medical Journal who refers from a London conference (BMJ 2003; 326: 1054).
Here, Professor Godfrey Oakley said, among other things:
“By not requiring mandatory addition of folic acid to the flour, the authorities have committed a fatal health policy error.” Oakley has the support of a number of colleagues, and cardiologist David Wald recommends, for example, that you take a dietary supplement of 800 µg of folic acid a day until the authorities do something about it.
The addition is not mandatory in any EU country, and thus the death toll reaches well over a million at the European level.
“It is an untimely hesitation, just as we have seen with selenium and vitamin C. Of course we must be thorough and critical, but we must use the documentation that is available. Now we can also in Denmark start to calculate how many lives our hesitation has cost us,” says doctor Claus Hancke, chairman of the Vitality Council.
Folic acid is thought to protect against heart disease and blood clots in the brain by lowering levels of homocysteine, an amino acid that has been linked to these two diseases for the past 15 years. Folic acid is also known to prevent neural tube defects (congenital, disabling spinal cord defects) and is therefore taken by many women before and during pregnancy.
The United States and Canada are among the 39 countries that have taken the research results seriously and have decided to add folic acid to flour. In Nova Scotia, for example, this has been done since 1998, and over the course of five years the number of deaths has been halved. (Canadian Medical Association Journal 2002;167:241-5).
“The authorities should take a general preventive approach and recommend folic acid supplementation – the research to date suggests that it could save many lives,” says Claus Hancke. “What we are seeing now is the sad dark side of many years of misinformation about dietary supplements.”
By: Vitality Council.
References:
BMJ 2003;326:1054.
Canadian Medical Association Journal 2002;167:241-5.
bmj.bmjjournals.com
www.cmaj.ca
www.iom.dk