Health

Flour additive linked to longer life

Adding the vitamin folate to flour, a practice begun in 1996 to prevent birth defects, also appears to have a striking effect against cardiovascular disease, preventing an estimated 48,000 deaths a year from strokes and heart attacks, a government study found.

Many experts hoped from the start that adding folate to food would be good for people's circulatory systems. The vitamin lowers homocysteine, and high levels of this amino acid have long been linked to heart attacks and strokes.

However, the new data, released at a conference Friday, are the first evidence from a large, population-based study to suggest this is actually happening.

The Food and Drug Administration ordered that grain foods be fortified with folate, one of the B vitamins, to help prevent serious birth defects called neural tube defects. Studies have shown the strategy worked, reducing them by about 20 percent.

However, the latest data suggest that by helping tame two of the world's biggest killers, the benefits of the extra folate "extend to the entire population, including those with limited access to health care," said Quanhe Yang, an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Yang reported the findings at a meeting in San Francisco of the American Heart Association.

People now get extra folate from enriched bread, flour, corn meal, rice, pasta and other grain products. Experts already know this has doubled the amount of folate in the average American's bloodstream and reduced people's homocysteine levels by 14 percent.

To learn if this has also translated into fewer deaths, the CDC researchers reviewed nationwide death certificate data to see how deaths from strokes and heart disease changed after folate was added. Deaths from both causes were already declining, so all of the change could not be attributed to folate.

"The critical issue is timing," Yang said. "We expect these changes to be gradual. We observed a sudden change around the time of the fortification."

From 1990 to 2001, there were almost 26-million deaths among Americans over age 40, including 8.2-million from heart disease and 3.2-million from stroke. The researchers estimate that folate in food led to 31,000 fewer deaths from stroke and 17,000 from heart disease each year from 1998 to 2001.

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