Folic Acid Essay -- essays research papers

The New Sensation. Before you sit down to munch on your breakfast cereal or bread, you might want to take notice of a vitamin that seems to be popping up more and more in ingredients. This is being Folic Acid. The FDA is recommending that it be added to foods and that people take it in pill form every day. This is mainly because it is a key component in the never-ending battle our body fights against diseases. What is it capable of? It is proven to lower chances of birth defects, and heart attacks. The FDA has been viewing the evidence of the chances of lowering birth defects and has ordered that enriched gain products increase their amounts of folic acid. This is because it is found that most women who are pregnant do not eat enough fruits and vegetables to have the same impact as Folic acid has. The effect it has is that it decreases the chance of neural birth defects. Neural birth defects can cause death shortly after birth. It is estimated that nearly 400,000 infants have this birth complications because of this, yet it has been proven that what folic acid can do can greatly reduce the risk. Not only can this acid reduce the birth defect rate; it can also lower the chance of heart attacks in men and woman. It is believed that there is an amino acid called homocystine in most people that sometimes may get too high, when this happens it causes scarred arteries and increases the risk of heart attacks. In this articles it states that less than 12-40% of A...