Folic Acid... good and bad

New studies suggest that getting too much folic acid might fuel certain cancers in some people.

And with the vitamin showing up in ready-to-eat cereals, bread, snack bars, multivitamins and more, some health experts fear that it's easy to far exceed the recommended daily intake of 400 micrograms.

There is now an urgent need, experts say, to figure out how much folate is enough but not too much for different segments of the population.

"Too little folic acid we know is not good, and too much folic acid is probably not good," said Connie Motter, a genetic counselor at Akron Children's Hospital in Ohio and co-chair of the National Council for Folic Acid, a coalition of advocacy groups. "The answer is not going to be easy."

In some ways, folic acid appears protective. The vitamin plays an essential role in the formation and repair of DNA and can help prevent development of certain cancers, particularly in the colon, where cells replicate especially fast.

Studies show that

people who get plenty of folic acid reduce their risk of developing colorectal cancer and precancerous polyps by 40% to 60%. But folic acid doesn't just help healthy cells grow. It also helps cancerous cells grow. Studies in animals have shown that once cells are on the path to becoming cancers, the vitamin makes things worse.

As far back as the 1940s, folic acid supplements were found to accelerate leukemia in children who were given the vitamin in the hope that it might help. (Such studies helped lead to a class of antifolate drugs that are among today's most common cancer treatments.)

More recently, researchers noticed that rates of colorectal cancer went up in North America around the same time that fortification began. One study, published by Mason and colleagues in 2007 in the journal Cancer Epidemiology Biomarkers & Prevention, acknowledged that the link could be a coincidence. But according to another study published this year, the same thing happened in Chile after fortification began there in 2000.

Mason estimates that

excess folic acid consumption

may cause an extra 15,000 cases of colorectal cancer each year in the U.S. and Canada. By comparison, fortification with the vitamin prevents an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 brain and spinal cord defects in both countries.

Folic acid's effects have also been tested in clinical trials. In the largest one completed, scientists studied almost 1,000 people who had had precancerous polyps removed from their colons. Half of the patients were randomly assigned to take a daily supplement of 1 milligram of folic acid (2.5 times the recommended intake of 400 micrograms). The others took a placebo.

Several years later, people in the folic acid group were more than twice as likely to have three or more polyps in their colons, the researchers reported in 2007 in the Journal of the American Medical Assn.


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So, a multi vitamin contains 400 mg of Folic Acid, the mdr. Should we stop taking multi viatmins totally? I do not eat fortified cereals, energy bars, etc.

Another thought.... all these YOUNG MOTHERS who are developing cc today have all been given folic acid during pregnancy to prevent birth defects. Sounds like modern medicine may be the cause of these early cc cases. (