Posted by kathryn in All In A Day's Work, The Micronutrients and Folate

I have been talking today about folate – what it’s used for, why we need it, where we get it from and so on. My next article in Wellbeing magazine is also on folate.

Folate is one of the B vitamins (B9), which we all need, it’s integral to DNA replication, cell growth and repair, as well as the formation of red blood cells.

Folate is found in a wide variety of foods including lentils and legumes, green leafy vegetables, liver, rice, beetroot, parsnips, asparagus, cauliflower, sunflower seeds, sprouted mung beans, corn, oranges.

Folate is particularly important for pregnant women, for preventing a group of birth defects called neural tube defects. Most of the women I see in clinic for pre-pregnancy care know they need to take folate, but not many know why they’re taking it. More significantly, very few of them know when folate is needed. For the purpose of preventing neural tube defects, folate is needed between days 25 – 29 of pregnancy. This is before most women know they’re pregnant, in fact it’s about the time most have realised their period is late and are doing the home pregnancy test.

So you need to start taking folate before you’re pregnant and you really do need to take a supplement. For avoiding pregnancy the recommended daily intake is 400mcg of folate per day. However, we only absorb 50% of the folate from the foods we eat, which means you need to eat about 800mcg of folate per day and this is a big ask.

The Choice website have some more information about folate which includes a personal folate counter . This is quite a useful tool, although it doesn’t seem to allow for the fact that you only absorb half of the folate in the foods you eat so remember that when you’re looking at your results. There’s also a really long list of all the foods that contain folate, per common measure on the US department of agriculture’s website.

11 July, 2006