Contact: Victor Herbert; [email protected]
In the February, 1997 issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Mount Sinai - Bronx VA nutrition researcher Victor Herbert reported that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-mandated (effective January 1, 1998) addition of folic acid fortification to grains (breads, cereals, pastas) will do more harm than good, unless the FDA also mandates fortification with free vitamin B12. To the contrary, having both vitamins in grains will help millions, says Herbert. According to the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), Dr. Herbert is one of the world's top 10 scientist/physicians in terms of scientific publications most cited by other researchers.
Dr. Herbert has petitioned the FDA to require that all grains fortified with folic acid also be fortified with a minimum of 25 micrograms of free vitamin B12 per 100 grams of product, and all sellers of folic acid supplements be required to add a minimum of 25 micrograms of vitamin B12 to each such supplement.
Dr. Herbert notes that the purpose of the FDA mandate to add folic acid is to reduce by about 2,000 per year the number of American fertile females who have genetically predisposed, inadequate- folate-related neural tube defect (NTD) babies. He states that this will harm Afro-American fertile females, who not only lack the genetic predisposition to have inadequate-folate-related NTD babies, but, to the contrary, are genetically predisposed to develop gastric damage with inability to absorb food vitamin B12 in the child-bearing years. In them, as in the millions of the elderly of all ethnic groups who develop gastric damage with inability to absorb food vitamin B12, and, in the more than half of all people infected with the AIDS virus who develop gastric damage with inability to absorb food vitamin B12 (reported by Herbert's group in 1990 in New York City residents infected with the AIDS virus), supplying folic acid alone, either as food fortificant or supplement, conceals the anemia
Years ago, the Mount Sinai - Bronx VA Alzheimer's Disease researchers, on Dr. Herbert's advice, added assessing vitamin B12 status to the evaluation of all patients referred to them with alleged Alzheimer's Disease, because about 1% of patients provisionally diagnosed as having Alzheimer's instead have vitamin B12 deficiency, cured by supplying vitamin B12.
In the same article, Dr. Herbert suggests that synthetic vitamin C and iron should no longer be added to foods or supplements, because his research shows that, when a multivitamin pill dissolves in the stomach, the synthetic vitamin C in it, unlike the natural vitamin C in foods, releases billions of free radicals from iron that not only destroy substantial amounts of the vitamin B12 and folic acid in the same pill, but also convert some of the vitamin B12 to potentially harmful warped B12 molecules ("analogues" of B12). In a paper in Journal of Nutrition in 1996, his group reviewed that as little as 100 mg of synthetic vitamin C (the "recommended dietary allowance" [RDA] for smokers) may be subtly toxic to everyone by causing premature death of normal macrophages (a cell whose job is to eat and destroy old red blood cells and invading bacteria).
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