They Say: Prenatal Folic Acid Not So Good After All
Am I the only one who is starting to feel like scientists flip a coin every day to decide what’s good for our kids? The latest flip flop hits those prenatal horse pills vitamins every mother tries to force down throughout her pregnancy.
Turns out that folic acid we always thought was so necessary for their development? This week, they’re saying we probably should hold off about three months. Stay tuned (these things are subject to change).
The study out of Norway has some heft to it. Researchers followed thirty-two thousand kids over a period of three years and found moms who took folic acid during the first three months of gestation were more likely to have a baby with respiratory issues all the way up to the eighteen-month mark. The kids were also twenty-four percent more likely to land in the hospital because of their wheezing.
Over the years, folic acid intake by pregnant moms has been liked to everything from a decrease in the incidence of spina bifida to a possible decrease in cancer in kids. I’ve known moms who started taking prenatal vites months before they even began TRYING for a baby because they wanted to have a healthy folic acid build-up in the body. And I’d imagine you’d be hard-pressed these days to find a prenatal vitamin that DOESN’T have folic acid built in (thank you March of Dimes).
So what’s a mom to do? Would you say the benefits outweigh the risks? Or should we just stay tuned for the other flip flop to drop?
Image: MLive
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Baby #1 – no caffine, no shellfish, no lunchmeat
Baby #2 – tea every day, raw oysters at McCormick and Shmicks on a date, and loads of salami.
Guess which baby sleeps better and is generally more laid back? Number 2.
F@#* it. They can’t make up their minds. I’m going to eat whatever the hell I want.
Whew. My mom didn’t worry about anything. lol. And I’m still kickin’.
I’m with Jen M. We all should but mothers specifically, should really concentrate on nutrition. Eating a healthy diet, proper exercising, RESTING, stress reduction, and just all around treating your body as the vessel it is for childbirth is so important.
We are not gods, though with medical technology we like to pretend we’re close, there is always going to be risk. Being pregnant and delivering a child is the hardest thing a human being volunteers it’s body to do!
We could just try eating a healthy diet heavy in vegetables. That should cover it.
Baloney. In China the highest rates of spina bifida and cleft palate in newborns occur in provinces where home grown corn is a daily staple in the diet. The homegrown corn is subject to Corn Mold which prevents the body from absorbing any folic acid. There are also many other studies that support folic acid to prevent birth defects. One study finding the reverse is not good enough to negate years of research in this area.
One problem is that you cannot perform a true, double-blind study on pregnant women or kids. (Because it is not ethical and/or no company wants to open themselves up so badly to a lawsuit.) Therefore, all “studies” done on pregnant women are retrospective. (They interview the women to ask if they took folic acid, etc.) These studies are seriously flawed, but they are the best that can be done.
I would probably say don’t worry if you took folic acid, but also don’t worry if you didn’t. (Is that wishy-washy or what?) Folic acid is supposed to reduce neural tube defects by 70%, but the natural occurrence of these defects is 1 in 1000. So it it should be reduced to .3 in 1000. In either case, you are unlikely to have a neural tube defect, even though the reduction is significant.
This is the case with most things people say you should/shouldn’t do when pregnant or have kids.
In most cases, kids will turn out just fine, no matter if you take folic acid, give them water in Nalgene bottles, formula feed them, etc.