LACED: The truth about folic acid (UK edition, paperback)

Folic acid is just a vitamin, isn’t it? Something we find in food? And if it prevents spina bifida, what could possibly be wrong with putting it in bread?

Unbeknown to most of the population, synthetic folic acid has been added to much of the UK’s flour since 2025, in preparation for a legal mandate from 13 December 2026. The new law will cover most non-wholemeal wheat flour, including organic and imported flour. Millions of people have already been eating it without ever being asked.

But folic acid differs from the folate found naturally in food. It is a synthetic, oxidised drug that our bodies struggle to process, that interacts with other medicines and that carries warnings on its licence, with the NHS advising millions of people to take it only on medical advice.

The government claims that adding folic acid to flour could prevent around 200 pregnancies affected by neural tube defects, including spina bifida, each year. But that figure is a modelled estimate rather than an observed result. And what about the risks to everyone else?

Why was a safety trial never carried out? Why were safeguards recommended by the government’s own scientific advisers left out of the law? And is monitoring after introducing it really going to be able to identify the problems?

In LACED, diagnostic pathologist Dr Clare Craig goes back to the original research, clinical trials and government documents to separate what we have been told from what the evidence actually shows.

The truth about folic acid is more complicated than you have been led to believe. And it could matter to your health.

Foreword by Dr John Campbell. Afterword by Dr Tim Kelly. Paperback, 220 pages. Delivery included.