Folic Acid is a vitally important member of the family of B group vitamins. It certainly is important for women during pregnancy in preventing some congenital problems in their children. There is no doubt at all that this is worthwhile.

I believe Canadian authorities recently decided to adopt a food fortification program involving the addition of folic acid to refined flours. It now appears likely that Britain will do much the same. The recommendation by the UK Food Standards Agency to add the vitamin to all flour and bread on sale in Britain within the next year is likely to be widely supported.

Research in Britain, Canada and the US has clearly shown the importance of folic acid in preventing babies being born with spina bifida and brain defects. It has been well known for years that women who take the vitamin from the start of their pregnancy can avoid the terrible defects that affect hundreds of children born each year. It is now suggested that folic acid may also combat strokes, bone disorders and heart disease in the whole population.

There are some observations I feel I must make on this topic. The first is that the mere suggestion of folic acid fortification completely endorses what I and many others have said for many years about denatured low nutritive value foods being common in modern food supply chains, particlularly after processing, such as in producing flours from whole grains. This strongly supports the need for supplementation, even though this is a narrowly focussed program of fortification. That modern processed foods fail to supply nutritional requirements is clearly acknowledged.

The second point will be less palatable for the advocates of fortification. You see, I believe more folic acid is needed and valuable but I also believe that refined flours - all of them - should be avoided like the plague. Adding a nutrient, or even a few nutrients, into a bad delivery system (flour and flour-based products) is ultimately an exercise in public health futility. The supposed gains are more than offset by the harm caused by consumption of the refined grains.

Refined flours make glue, no matter how their flavours are enhanced in assorted products or how desirable they are to the senses. When you consume these glues you can expect an unavoidable constipating effect. Unless, of course, you are one of a quite substantial percentage of the population with a sensitivity to the grains used, such as the very common wheat sensitivity, or have Celiac disease and react to the gluten in wheat, rye, oats and barley. In these cases there is a good chance that the flours will actually cause diarrhea.

Additionally, refined flours are carbohydrates with a high glycemic index. This means they cause rapid blood sugar level peaks, resulting in insulin exhaustion, moving people along the path towards diabetes. We should be encouraging people to consume less flours or preferably none at all, certainly not more. We should not be making flours a vital source of folic acid and promoting its consumption forevermore as "healthy", no matter how hard the grain producers lobby.

Finally, the whole recommended process is an ill-conceived form of medicalization of food and nutrition. All of the B group of vitamins, of which folic acid is a member, work most effectively and efficiently when taken together and in certain proportions. They each work less well when isolated. Yet the approach wherein a specific vitamin is used to essentially prevent a single condition (basically spina bifida) is in keeping with the medical drugs model. This bankrupt model is seriously flawed.

People need to obtain health building whole-foods based nutrition and should be avoiding the manufactured, overly processed material being passed off as foods. This approach seeks to avoid the problem, not patch up a bad system with a poor solution.