Qu'ils mangent de la brioche (with a little folic acid sprinkled in)
Some weeks ago, I commented on a post from Dr. Clare Craig linking to a petition (her own) to stop the imminent mandatory fortification of white flour with folic acid. I scoffed at the idea that petitions have any value, saying that they “exist only to humour the mob” and more or less called her gullible for believing otherwise. It remains my view that petitions are futile, indeed worse than that, as I will go on to discuss. Nevertheless, I appreciate the comment might be taken as ungracious criticism of someone who is trying to do some good. For what it’s worth, I am quite fond of Clare and tried to stick up for her a bit in the past when Bottley and his Stoneheads were having a pile-on and trying to get her account taken down. I think she is a good-natured person, her bizarre support for Israel notwithstanding. Back to my comment, anyway, and its derision of the idea of protest: as is often the case, it’s a subject better addressed in longform. Put another way, Substack is the more suitable medium for having an almighty rant; and so I proceed in that vein.
Effective 13th December 2026, all non-wholemeal flour produced in England, Scotland and Wales must be ‘fortified’ with 250 micrograms (0.25mg) of folic acid per 100g. Small, artisanal mills with an output of <500 metric tonnes per annum will be exempt. It’s estimated that around one third of all foods will be affected, including all manner of baked goods, pastas, pizzas, canned soups, jarred sauces, instant gravies, pre-packaged spice mixes and many not-so-intuitive examples such as processed meats and seafoods. Bear in mind, flour is used widely as a thickening agent, binding agent, bulking agent, anti-caking agent and a carrier for seasonings and batters. Folic acid will therefore saturate - or, more accurately, contaminate - a huge amount of supermarket inventory. Note, large numbers of products are already voluntarily fortified: cereals, spreads, plant-based milks, energy bars, juices and so on. So, the incoming mandate will be amping up what the marketplace is already doing. This is all being done in the name of preventing neural tube defects (NTDs). I’ll begin by covering the relevant biochemistry which, whilst somewhat tedious, is important to appreciate the egregious nature of what they are doing.
Folate (otherwise known as vitamin B9) is an essential nutrient, present naturally in a variety of foods, chickpeas, dark leafy greens and cruciferous vegetables being some of the richer sources. In foods it exists largely in reduced forms, most notably active 5-MTHF (5-methyltetrahydrofolate), the dominant circulating form, which is also sold as a nutritional supplement: “L-Methylfolate”. Note the methyl- prefix here - it is already methylated and ready for uptake with minimal further processing (food-sourced folates have a polyglutamate tail which is enzymatically snipped into a monoglutamate for absorption in the gut).
Folate has a uniquely important role in what is called one-carbon metabolism: the donating of one-carbon groups including the methyl group (CH₃), methylene group (CH₂) and formyl group (CHO). Supplying these one-carbon groups is essential for DNA and RNA synthesis, making red blood cells (with its all-important partner, vitamin B12), and the methylation cycle. The methylation cycle involves transferring said methyl groups (CH₃) from one molecule to another by the master donor S-Adenosyl-Methionine (SAMe). SAMe starts out as humble methionine. An enzyme combines methionine with ATP to form SAMe. SAMe then hands off its methyl groups in a variety of contexts to regulate DNA (i.e. to turn genes on or off) and make hormones and brain chemicals. (This is why you will find SAMe sold as a nutritional supplement said to support ‘mood and wellbeing’). After donation, SAMe degrades (via S-adenosylhomocysteine) into homocysteine, which is toxic in excess. Folate supplies the necessary methyl group to convert homocysteine back into harmless methionine, which is then converted back into SAMe; and so the cycle goes on.
During early pregnancy, folate levels in the embryo are crucial to healthy development. A track of neural cells is laid down vertically from the tailbone up to the cranium, which will become the scaffold for the brain and spinal cord. In what is a marvel of embryology, the two parallel edges of this cellular track curl upwards, making for a central groove or valley. This curling continues until the two edges meet, first around the neck before zippering shut in both directions through a series of anchor points: up to the head and down to the tailbone so as to form a hollow tube - the neural tube. This zippering-shut process must occur with exquisite precision and necessitates one-carbon donation to support both the tremendous cell division involved and the cytoskeletal adaptation, namely the morphing of the neural cells in a manner which allows for the two edges to seamlessly fuse. Failed closure of the neural tube, either at the cranial end or at the caudal end, results in one of two serious birth defects respectively: anencephaly (which almost always implies a stillbirth or death soon after birth) or spina bifida, where the spinal column has not closed, typically causing severe, lifelong disability.
This critical event happens during a very narrow window - around four weeks after conception - often before the woman is aware that she is pregnant, and there is a lag of a few weeks to build up serum folate levels. The argument made for mandatory fortification, therefore, is that intake in women of childbearing potential needs to occur proactively (pre-conception) rather than reactively.
In reality, NTDs are not caused by deficient intake of folate, or at least hardly ever is that the problem. Whilst poor nutrition (eating highly-processed calorie-dense junk) is rampant in the West, malnutrition (inadequate nutrient intake) is very rare. By sheer dint of consuming lots of crap, we are - albeit by accident rather than good intention - meeting and generally exceeding our nutrient requirements. Make no mistake, the problems of the Western diet are overwhelmingly those of excess, not deficiency: way, way, way too many calories. You will often hear fitness influencers speaking of “hitting your macros” and so on. The idea is pushed that you can’t cram enough protein into your diet. Outside of active muscle builders (applicable almost entirely to men in their youth, since women do not have the testosterone levels necessary for comparable muscle growth), large protein consumption is surplus to your needs and not doing your kidneys any favours. You need the right amount for your age, sex and activity, not a gram more. Outside of a certain cohort including certain elderly people who cannot hold down their food and a subset of vegans, very few people are getting too little protein; most are getting too much of it, alongside carbs and fats of course.
Back to the issue of NTDs, we know inadequate dietary folate is almost always not the underlying cause thanks to the work of epidemiologist James Mills, who showed back in the 1990s that mothers of babies born with NTDs had folate levels on a par with healthy controls. What they did have, though, were abnormal levels of homocysteine, indicating the problem is one of folate metabolism, i.e. a processing defect rather than insufficient intake. This is down to a variety of causes including the presence of autoantibodies to the folate receptors, and defects in the enzyme that converts homocysteine into methionine, methionine synthase (MTR). In other cases, lack of vitamin B12 - without which MTR cannot do its job properly - is to blame. Other risk factors include insulin resistance or maternal diabetes (typically correlating with obesity) due to the suppression of the Pax3 gene, which is a key regulator of the closure of the neural tube. Thankfully our bodies have a backup methyl donor, choline, that is able to bypass the various bottlenecks to which folate is susceptible: it works via its metabolite betaine, which remethylates homocysteine through a separate enzyme (BHMT). A reasonable approach would be to recommend that sexually active women who are not on contraception include choline-rich foods in their diet: eggs, beef liver, fish or plant alternatives.
The state, however, is not concerned with the distinction between deficient folate intake versus deficient folate metabolism. They say: sod all that, if we just flood the systems of recently pregnant women with folate, we can bludgeon our way through these metabolic bottlenecks and more-or-less guarantee any embryo will have access to adequate folate. Since there is no practical way of limiting this supplementation to the cohort of interest, we’ll just have to mass medicate the population at large via the food system.
The snag here, though, is that active folate (5-MTHF) is not stable enough in its free acid form to make for a suitable food additive. Stabilised salt forms exist and are used in supplements, but at the scale and cost demanded by industrial milling they are not viable. Enter folic acid. Folic acid is the synthetic analogue or counterpart of folate, a petrochemical derivative. It is the fully oxidised form of folate: it lacks four hydrogen atoms from its pteridine ring, resulting in two additional double bonds (see red arrows), making it exceptionally heat-stable and shelf-stable and therefore ideal as a flour additive.
We can’t use folic acid directly, though. Our bodies must first reduce it (add hydrogen atoms) into tetrahydrofolate (THF), a job performed in two steps by an enzyme called dihydrofolate reductase (DHFR). THF then picks up a one-carbon unit to form 5,10-methylene-THF, which a second enzyme, methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase (MTHFR) - also the name of the gene that encodes it - reduces to active 5-MTHF. This is where it hits a bottleneck. DHFR is expressed in humans at only very modest levels in the gut and the liver because it was never meant to do the job of metabolising folic acid. It is having that job forced upon it. Its native job is to recycle spent molecules of natural folate, namely dihydrofolate (DHF), back into THF. The second bottleneck is that gene variants of MTHFR involving either one copy (heterozygous) or both copies (homozygous) cause reduced efficiency of the enzyme and these variants are very common, some 60-70% of people carry at least one variant.
The result is a spillover of Unmetabolised Folic Acid (UMFA) into the bloodstream, which is detectable in the serum of >95% of the US population, not a country exactly famed for its stellar health outcomes. Anyway, it is UMFA that is the subject of concern, implicated in various health problems. UMFA binds the cell-surface folate receptors (notably folate receptor-alpha) with much higher affinity than natural folates, displacing or outcompeting them. This leads paradoxically to functional folate deficiency and rising levels of homocysteine. So you have a primary issue of UMFA and a secondary one of elevated homocysteine, associated, centrally, with the following harmful effects:
Masking vitamin B12 deficiency: methionine synthase (MTR, met earlier) is needed to unlock natural folate and build healthy red blood cells. When you lack vitamin B12, this enzyme shuts down, locking your folate away and causing a clear form of anaemia that is easily spotted. UMFA, however, can be fed into the folate pool by DHFR without this B12-dependent step, so no anaemia emerges whilst the damaging effects of B12 deficiency to your nerves occur silently and irreversibly.
Suppression of Natural Killer (NK) cells - part of our immune system’s frontline defence against viruses and early cancer cells. Note, the evidence here is observational.
Cancer: a significant rise in colorectal cancers was observed in the USA in 1998, coinciding with mandatory folic acid fortification. However, this was not sustained and was followed by a decline in rates. Folic acid has a dual personality with respect to cancer: it is cancer-promoting in the context of existing tumours, acting like a fire accelerant. This is due to its displacing natural folates, allowing oncogenes to be activated and tumour-suppressing genes to be switched off. On the other hand, it appears to be protective against cancer insofar as it supports DNA repair and methylation. Note, however, this protective effect is a function of folate, not folic acid itself, and is therefore subject to the metabolism bottlenecks discussed. In any event, one interpretation of the spike in colorectal cancers is that it was a ‘flushing out’ of existing tumours or pre-cancerous polyps; increased detection from expanding colonoscopy screening is a competing explanation.
There is no consensus as to what constitutes a safe level of UMFA and establishing such a level is not something which is amenable to a controlled study for two reasons: ethical constraints and the duration of study necessary. After all, UMFA does not cause acute toxicity. Its harms accumulate insidiously through chronic exposure, namely a circulating pool of UMFA being permanently resident in the bloodstream, causing gradual epigenetic drift and immune atrophy. Moreover, when a doctor orders a standard serum folate blood test, the lab test cannot distinguish between healthy, chemically reduced dietary folate and harmful, unreduced UMFA. It’s all lumped together into one high number, which doctors traditionally interpret as an indicator of good nutrition. Consequently, we only have pre- and post-fortification observational data to go by. Since the signals are modest and there are numerous confounders, teasing out the harmful effects of UMFA is very difficult, almost impossible.
The bottom line here is that public health is perfectly willing to hijack the food system and put the population’s health at a degree of unknown risk for the benefit of a minuscule cohort; and I do mean minuscule. The Number Needed to Treat (NNT) for this initiative is something in the order of 330,000 per year which is to say you need to force folic acid on 330,000 people for a year to spare a single theoretical case of an NTD. Such a trade-off is thoroughly perverse but, if you reject the state’s prerogative to violate your bodily autonomy, as I’m sure many of you do, then it is ultimately beside the point because the alleged benefit is irrelevant.
Suffice it to say, the very term ‘autonomy’ is anathema to public health and you need only cast your mind back to 2020/21 to know this is so. You will remember the rabid archetype that came out of the woodwork to prop up the lie of a deadly virus stalking the land. Shills like Dr. Rachel Clarke and Prof. Devi Sridhar were among the worst offenders on the propaganda front, complicit in inflicting widespread misery, above all on the elderly isolated in care homes.
I’ve digressed a little. The point is, a decision to adulterate our food is not guided by any principle that recognises you as an individual but by cold, utilitarian arithmetic. Folic acid is extremely cheap and every case of an NTD is said to cost around £3 million in lifetime economic and health benefit. This £3m is a composite figure based on the loss of quality of life to the affected person (which is translated to a monetary sum for every year of life), loss of productivity by being excluded from the workforce and direct healthcare costs (the NHS burden). Based on the government’s impact assessment, every £1 spent across the milling industry on fortification is expected to yield around £13-£15. The payoff is therefore attractive for them and that’s all that matters.
Remember the state’s objectives. It wants as many tax-generating slaves as possible to service its ballooning debt obligations, which now stand at 95% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Keeping nominal GDP high is crucial to sustaining the creditworthiness of a nation swamped in debt. The debt-to-GDP ratio is a principal driver of the bond market, i.e. how much lenders to the UK government demand to be paid in interest for the risk they are taking on. In an ideal scenario, the state would force the slaves to keep working till they drop dead without ever paying them a penny of their pension entitlement. They cannot get away with that, though. Once the slaves learn they are not getting anything in return for their taxes, they will throw down their tools. The system only works on the latent promise that after slaving away until the age of 67, reprieve awaits in the form of a measly £241 per week State Pension.
If you want to understand why the country and continental Europe have been flooded with immigrants for the last 20 years, there is your answer: Europe is facing a demographic crisis with an ageing population and fertility rates far below replacement level whilst drowning in debt. Italy’s fertility rate has sunk to a staggering 1.14 children per woman, deaths heavily outnumber births, and over 24% of the population is already aged 65 or older; and they have 140% debt-to-GDP. These nations are desperate to prop up nominal GDP and support the bond market. It does not matter that the immigrants arrive empty-handed. GDP = Consumption (C) + Investment (I) + Government Spending (G) + Net Exports (X - M). It measures the sheer volume of money changing hands, regardless of who owns it, how it was generated, or whether it improves anyone’s quality of life. As a brief aside, the idea of depopulation or culling us, which has been a favourite in truther circles, even if limited to what they would view as non-productive elements of society, namely the elderly, the poor and the disabled, is contrary to their overall interests. Although it is true this cohort does not generate tax, they are all consumers and so contribute to the ‘C’ component of the formula.
Private equity billionaires like Stephen Schwarzman of Blackstone or David Rubenstein of Carlyle build wealth by executing Leveraged Buyouts (LBOs), namely buying companies using a small amount of cash and huge amounts of debt. It’s all about cheap debt and immigration supports cheap debt via different mechanisms including helping to buffer both inflation (via wage suppression) and the debt-to-GDP ratio. Needless to say, those belonging to this stratum of society are immune to the cultural fallout. They live in ultra-rich enclaves. They will lie back atop their Lürssen yachts in the French Riviera, amused as the masses squabble amongst themselves in the naïve belief that their preferred party-political tribe is different from any of the others in substance over style.
I don’t say this to stoke resentment towards billionaires or wealthy people generally; there are already plenty of grifters who have assumed that role, Gary Stevenson being a prominent example. I only hope to remind those who apparently need serial reminding that the state’s agenda is not at the mercy of your opinion or whichever puppet happens to be installed at No. 10. Western regimes - and Britain especially - are masters at sustaining the delusion that the system is answerable to the masses. It starts with a convincing pantomime calling itself a parliamentary democracy featuring a bicameral legislature, the pomp, the robes, the regalia, the performative jousting at the dispatch box between teams red, blue, turquoise and yellow. Then they grant you a rich toolkit of seemingly democratic mechanisms and protections: elections (both local and national), writing to your MP, FOI requests, the Parliamentary Ombudsman, Public Bill Committees, Select Committees, PMQs, the Ministerial Code, Judicial Reviews, Inquiries (oh we love an Inquiry), Petitions and Public Consultations.
On that last count, they allegedly “consulted” us about folic acid fortification back in 2019. What fraction of the population do you imagine would have even been aware of the consultation (assuming they know what one is), much less responded to it? Less than 1%. Do you recall a single media outlet reporting on it? No. Would it have made the blindest bit of difference if you had responded? No. By the time a policy has reached consultation stage, it’s already been determined. The “consultation” exists only for some final pre-legislative tweaking and, as I say, to pay lip service to the idea that your view is being sought; that they are in some way accountable to you. These processes are without exception a charade and exist only to keep the masses orderly and docile. Nothing reassures the state more than your engaging in officially-approved, permitted forms of protest and complaint: voting, writing to your MP, going on marches, signing petitions and so on. As long as you are doing those things, you are well contained and easily profiled.
So, back to Gary for a moment, if he were less of a grifter, he would stop leading people up the garden path by trying to expand the state’s power to engage in extortion under penalty of imprisonment, commonly known as tax. Instead he would be lobbying vociferously for the abolition of the most offensive of taxes, inheritance tax. Rather than constantly gloating along the lines of “look, the fing is, yeah, you’re up against me, I’m a professional trader”, he might try helping people protect their net worth against runaway inflation by sharing his trades or if not specific trades then his market forecasts, all for free.
The democratic toolkit, as I call it, is very, very effective and allows the average Westerner to wallow in a smug notion of living in a ‘liberal democracy’ and to point their fingers at the likes of Russia and Iran. “Look how they treat gay people, and how women are oppressed!” The media has been heavily pushing a caricature of theocratic oppression in Iran for the last four or so years, beginning with the reported death of a 22-year-old woman, Mahsa Amini. Isn’t it curious how this turned out to be a precursor to bombing their country including civilian infrastructure and a girls’ school? Isn’t it also curious how this coincided with Iran selling 300,000 barrels a day of oil in Yuan to China at the expense of the flailing Petrodollar? That is not to defend the human rights records of the likes of Russia, Iran or China - in many cases they are appalling. It is only to highlight that the West commits its human rights abuses with a suit on and has a far more evolved propaganda machine.
Gays and women come up a lot, you’ll notice, during finger-pointing chats. The masses are programmed through rote learning that cheap tokens of freedom - things like gay rights and liberal drug and alcohol laws - are all-important markers of a free society. The state is more than happy to dish out freedoms of this kind and grant the masses all manner of hedonistic outlets.
When it comes to women, I suggest they have certainly not been beneficiaries of the liberal values foisted upon them by the feminists, beginning with suffrage. The agenda has been decidedly devious: promise them emancipation from the ‘evil patriarchy’ and recruit them into the workplace so as to make corporate slaves out of them. They were simply made to swap one master for another, a particularly bad deal that has left many of them childless and, if not childless, then lacking a stable nuclear family. Fatherless households are at an all-time high in Britain. Nearly 50% of first-born children today experience parental separation by the time they reach early adolescence (age 14), versus 21% of those born in 1970. Meanwhile, the number of women whoring themselves out online on OnlyFans - or OnlyFans Lite in the form of X and Instagram - for either money or a limitless supply of validation from strangers is also at an all-time high. One observes a correlation between these two facts.
I hope my point is clear: where ‘democracy’ is concerned, ignore the lofty rhetoric and focus on real outcomes. Things like the fact that they injected 94% of the population with an unlicensed genomic drug (deployed under a temporary use authorisation (TUA) - not a licence) after telling you that you could leave your home for one hour’s exercise a day; or how war criminals (murderers) like Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell roam free, enjoying a lucrative political afterlife.
The fact they are soon to adulterate your food with folic acid is just another illustration of the utter contempt in which they (politicians) hold you. I know some of you will resist this characterisation and continue to cling in vain to the idea of a benevolent politician: “You’re too cynical. Not everybody in politics is like that”; “There are good people who just want to make a difference”. I have heard these platitudes ad nauseam. I can concede that very occasionally decent people slip through the net but they are fringe ambassadors of the system and assuredly marginalised or ousted. There is an especially low tolerance for those who dare to oppose the Zionist war machine. Robin Cook was a victim in this regard. Jeremy Corbyn, leave aside his batty lefty economics for a moment, opposed every single war from Vietnam onwards through to the Syrian air strikes. As soon as he became a credible threat, i.e. in with a fighting chance of becoming PM (he was a 10/11 favourite in mid-2017), boom, they ran the “anti-Semite” smear campaign, mercilessly. Lowe and Farage know where their bread is buttered on that front, make no mistake about it. You can ignore the theatrical hostilities:
I arrive at my parting advice to readers. The game is rigged and always has been. Stop participating in it in any capacity: as a protestor, a voter, a signatory to a petition, whatever. The health and wellbeing of you, your family and your friends is all that matters. Allocate your resources strictly and exclusively to activities that serve that end. For a brief period, I entertained the concept of mass resistance to the technocratic agenda. When the vaccine was being rolled out in 2021, I wrote a long thread urging people in earnest to refuse it, believing that keeping uptake below a critical threshold had the potential to derail any plans for vaccine passports, which were being mooted at the time as a gateway to digital ID. Being caught up in the fervour of it all, I believed, amusingly, that a mass of people rejecting the vaccine would precipitate the emergence of a sort of anarchy that would manifest broadly as resisting the expanding surveillance state and taxation - central features of state tyranny.
In the end, 94% queued up for the jabs. Even where the dissenting contingent is concerned, no sooner had the scamdemic blown over than nearly everyone reverted to type, which is to say back to the safe refuge of their respective party-political tribes. In fact, as far as I can tell, they are now as wedded to party politics as they’ve ever been, with no discernible trace of having ‘awoken’. At the same time, chilling powers of surveillance have been assumed in the form of the Online Safety Act whilst Live Facial Recognition cameras are being rolled out nationwide.
I can no longer in good conscience advocate resisting the ‘agenda’ to anyone. It will serve only to deprive you of time, energy and sometimes money and indeed there is a school of thought which says that resistance movements are designed to do just that. To that extent, maybe the normies, whose diet of popular culture truthers (myself included) were keen to ridicule, had the last laugh, at least insofar as they avoided some of the more apocalyptic fearporn that Twitter was awash with during that whole surreal episode that was 2020/21.
Whatever unpleasant initiatives governments have in store for us over the coming decades, they will fail only due to poor implementation and not because you signed an e-petition. The advantages they have are enormous and insurmountable. It is a case of adapting to their plans more than resisting them: circumventing rules, sometimes flat-out breaking them, where possible and at acceptable risk.
I conclude with some dietary advice where folic acid is concerned. It’s not panic stations. Some commentators are guilty of sensationalising the risks. We will not see a tidal wave of disease - the effects of UMFA are not of that nature. The harm is best understood by analogy with ionising radiation of the kind we are exposed to when flying or when having an x-ray or a CT scan. Occasional or infrequent exposure does not pose any material risk to your health but your cumulative, lifetime dosage matters: chronic exposure is associated with a non-negligible increase in your risk of cancer. By the same token, you will want to be conscious of your cumulative exposure to fortified products and at least limit - or, better still, largely eliminate - them from your diet. The distribution of folic acid will be skewed towards processed foods and ultra-processed foods (UPFs). You should therefore see this as a golden opportunity to eschew processed junk and refined grain - a relatively novel phenomenon in the human diet - in favour of organic, whole foods. Godspeed.