There have been calls to completely abandon the practice, with a petition gaining more than 50,000 signatures.<\/p>\n
The petition stated that those with B12 deficiency and certain cancers should avoid folic acid, describing it as “unethical to mass medicate the entire population”.<\/p>\n
Dr Blackburn said she understood that people liked “to have control over what goes into their bodies” but she said she believed the benefits outweighed the risks.<\/p>\n
“Essentially there is no evidence that having extra folic acid in flour is going to cause any ill health in anyone,” she said.<\/p>\n
Other countries such as Canada and the US have been putting folic acid into flour for years and have seen a drop in birth defects.<\/p>\n
The DHSC said the new regulations would help provide women with a higher baseline intake of folic acid thus “better protecting their babies in all scenarios”.<\/p>\n
A spokesperson for the government department said: “Our number one priority is the health of children. <\/p>\n
“Scientists have carefully worked out the right amount [of folic acid] to add, so it’s both effective and safe.”<\/p>\n
They added that the decision was based on “longstanding, independent, expert advice” and followed “extensive” public consultation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There have been calls to completely abandon the practice, with a petition gaining more than 50,000 signatures. The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":756463,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[59,102,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-756462","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-gb","tag-health","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/756462","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=756462"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/756462\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/756463"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=756462"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=756462"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=756462"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}