By MARTIN JOHNSTON health reporter
Bakers and millers have won Health Ministry backing to add folic acid to bread and flour to help reduce New Zealand's high rate of children being born with problems such as spina bifida.
About 40 per cent of commercially baked bread already has added folic acid, a
synthetic form of a B group vitamin called folate, says the ministry's chief adviser for child and youth health, Dr Pat Tuohy.
Some breakfast cereals, fruit juices and soy products are also fortified with folic acid.
Dr Tuohy said the ministry had changed from its previously neutral stance on fortification after talks over the past three months with a lobby group representing millers, bakers, scientists, researchers and the CCS (formerly the Crippled Children's Society).
Fortification of selected foods has been permitted since 1996.
The national president of CCS, Lyall Thurston, who has a son with spina bifida, said his group had lobbied for fortification for more than a decade. "The progress has been far too slow; the cost has been great in human terms."
Safe-food campaigners have expressed concerns about the catch-all effect of fortification, saying healthier eating and targeted campaigns with supplementary pills should be used instead.
Consumption of an adequate amount of folic acid is linked with lowered rates of neural tube defects - spine and skull defects that can lead to conditions including spina bifida and anencephalus (a brain disorder).
Spina bifida afflicts up to 50 babies a year. Pregnancies may also be terminated because of it.
Sixty-two per cent of women know folic acid can prevent defects but only 17 per cent take it, often because their pregnancies were unplanned, says a Christchurch Medical School study.
The ministry says women considering becoming pregnant should take a 0.8 milligram daily supplement from four weeks before conception until after the 12th week of pregnancy, or 5 milligrams if they have a family history of neural tube defects.
It also advocates they eat folate-rich foods such as green, leafy vegetables, fruit, liver and kidney.
The ministry is now supporting fortification at about half the permitted level "as an initial step."
