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Is It Working?

James L. Mills, MD,MS; Lucinda England, MD,MSPH

JAMA. 2001;285:3022-3023.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

Whether your dinner plans include tacos, spaghetti carbonara, crispy fried rice, or just a bacon-lettuce-tomato on toast, you can bet that you will be having folic acid tonight. Since January 1, 1998, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has required that all enriched cereal grains must be fortified with 140 µg of folic acid per 100 g of grain.¹ This regulation was introduced because folic acid, taken prior to conception, can prevent many neural tube defects (NTDs) and because an alarming number of women of childbearing age were not following the US Public Health Service recommendation to take 400 µg/d of folic acid routinely.

Has the food fortification strategy worked? Until now there was little good evidence one way or the other. In this issue of THE JOURNAL, Honein and colleagues² report that the birth prevalence of NTDs has decreased by 19% . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Author Affiliation: Pediatric Epidemiology Section, Division of Epidemiology, Statistics and Prevention Research, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Md.

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