Could High Folic Acid Consumption Affect Future Genetic Make-Up?
Make no mistake about it, Dr. Mark Lucock is a fervent proponent of folic acid. He believes people, especially pregnant women, should avail themselves of every opportunity to take folic acid-enriched foods and vitamins. Nevertheless, Lucock, a nutrition scientist at the University of Newcastle in Australia, believes the growing emphasis on the benefits of folic acid could end up placing humanity in a quandary, he says. Society could be engineering its own acute dependency on folate, he proposed recently with a British counterpart in Nature Review Genetics Journal. Granted, its not a health problem with which humanity should be immediately concerned, though it is an issue that may affect people two or three generations down the road. The genetic change under discussion is the possible increase of the number of people born with a gene that increases the risk of heart disease, cancer and pregnancy complications if not enough folate is consumed.
