NZ bakers say adding folic acid to bread will be too costly

From the New Zealand Press Association:

Bakers mounting a publicity campaign to oppose the folate "fortification" of bread to protect babies against a devastating birth defect claim say adding the diet supplement will cost them millions of dollars.

The Baking Industry Association (BIANZ) is making a last-minute stand against the health move, agreed between Australia and New Zealand, and has asked for implementation of the supplements to be delayed.

BIANZ president Jason Heaven said a review of the supplements will not produce a decision until October - a month after existing regulations say that folic acid must be added to bread.

The folic acid fortification was ordered last year to prevent some devastating neural tube defects in babies, such as spina bifida, giving protection to women unaware they might be pregnant.

But the bakers said any U-turn on the project will mean they are not only faced with the cost of installing equipment to add the folic acid from September, but the cost of taking it out if the rule is axed.

"Bakeries around the country will spend millions of dollars in the process of introducing folic acid to their products," said BIANZ executive officer Belinda Jeursen. "If the law is reversed again a few months after its introduction, you can double that cost".

Folic acid is added to flour at the mills in Australia, but Heaven said bakers here will be adding it at the bakery in its raw form or as part of an improver or premix.

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According to figures on the Ministry of Health website, the cost of adding folic acid has been estimated at $1.7m in the first year and $2.3m annually after that. The benefit from reducing birth defects is estimate at $13m a year, with a net benefit over 15 years of $135m.

Critics of the addition of extra folic acid to the national diet, branded as "mass medication", initially raised concerns over the possibility of an increased cancer risk in old people.

But Professor Murray Skeaff, a specialist in human nutrition at Otago University, said on Monday that a big "state of the art" scientific study which has not yet been published, "shows that there is no increase in cancer risk with high-dose folic acid".

Animal studies have shown too much folic acid supplements in pills can spur some cancers. And one study which tracked 640 men found that 10 years later, folic acid users were more likely to have developed prostate cancer.

But Skeaff said that on the basis of the cancer risk, "there is no reason the proposed fortification should not go ahead" "There is no evidence of cancer risk."

At a conference in Prague two weeks ago, a pooled analysis of all the randomised control trials of folic acid were revealed by the clinical trials service unit at Oxford in Britain.

The results from around 35,000 individuals who participated in studies of high dosage folic acid supplementation in countries around the world "showed that there was no significant increase or decrease in the risk of cancer" Skeaff said.

The trials used high dosage folic acid, ranging from 800 micrograms to about 2500 micrograms a day, compared with the proposed addition of 140 micrograms a day to the New Zealand diet.

The studies, mainly done in Europe and North America since the mid-1990s, found that folic acid and B vitamins had no effect on cancer risk in the people taking them.

"The results showed no evidence of increased risk for prostate cancer, and they showed no evidence of increased risk for colorectal cancer, which are the two forms of cancer for which some much smaller studies had previously found some evidence of increased risk," said Skeaff.

Lyall Thurston, speaking for a coalition of parents of children with spina bifida, said the planned supplements would reduce the number of babies born with neural tube defects. He claimed the campaign against them was being funded for commercial reasons.