Folic Acid And Mental Illness

If you remember last year's March of Dimes TV ad that had a stork dropping by bringing a woman the surprising news of a pregnancy, you know they're on a campaign to teach women the importance of always having folic acid in their systems. A mother's having folic acid in her system at the time of her baby's conception will prevent 50-70% of all neural tube defects. That means life-long and extreme impairments like spina bifida and anencephaly can be prevented with a little spinach salad.
The point the March of Dimes stressed is that because half of all pregnancies are surprises, and because the brain and spinal cord are forming in that large gap of time between when a woman becomes pregnant and when she actually finds out that she's pregnant, women of childbearing age should have folic acid in their system just in case.
Concurring with them is the CDC, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention's Division of Reproductive Health and the National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities.

The CDC released a report saying this, and the Washington Post reported it under the unhelpful title "Forever Pregnant." Some of the reactions I've read on the Internet are amazing. When the CDC developed a school lesson plan which asks students the pros and cons of imparting to the public the simple message "If all women who could get pregnant consume 400 micrograms of folic acid every day, 50%-70% of neural tube defects could be prevented," they hadn't counted on the fools of the blogosphere. They had assumed the cons would be things like "Changing eating habits is hard," or "It costs a lot of money to teach people to change habits;" not "The Religious Right is trying to make me a baby factory."

My father's family were the beneficiaries of a NIH anti-Pellagra program that taught Southern mothers not to base their family's diet on corn. This was part of FDR's evil plot to prevent the contracting of an endemic nutritional disease that had a 40% fatality rate.

Some of the most ignorant, Bush Derangement Syndrome-induced crap you'll ever read in your life can be found here.

One example after the jump:

*"Controlling women's bodies

The people working so hard to make abortion illegal have now gone another step in their relentless persuit of total control over women's bodies. According to the Washington Post, the Bush administration has issued new federal guidelines instructing "all females capable of conceiving a baby to treat themselves -- and to be treated by the health care system -- as pre-pregnant, regardless of whether they plan to get pregnant anytime soon."

It's only a matter of time before Ayran-looking women will be awarded extra Deutschemarks dollars for every baby they bring to term."

MOM is wading further into this than I could stand to, and has much more, as does Coalition of the Swilling.

UPDATE:
What's the National Institutes of Health up to today? Telling women of childbearing age to take folic acid:

The panel endorsed consumption of folic acid by women of childbearing age to prevent congenital deformities of the nervous system, such as spina bifida.

Here's another health tip: instead of relying on a newspaper's account of what a report says, read the report yourself. It's better for your blood pressure.

(If needed, WaPo login/pswd=pokemon@pokemon.com/pokemon)

Posted by floridacracker at May 18, 2006 03:26 PM