Original title: Low carbohydrate diets may increase risk of neural tube defects

In fact: Low Folic acid diets may increase risk of neural tube defects

This is not the first bias researches against Low Carb diet.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/...2.1198/abstract


The very first golden rules in Low Carb Diet is to eat multi-vitamins/minerals pills and many other like B-Complex... daily.

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In fact, it is much safer and economical to eat pills instead of sugar, pesticides and chemical rich fruits/vegetables/grains... Some even come with contaminated salmonella.

If anything, low-carb diets advocate to eat more veggies, not less. It turns out several veggies contain folic acid already.

On the other hand, considering that some populations thrived on meat diets, it's likely that the association between folic acid and birth defects isn't due to a dietary folic acid deficiency, but to some other factor that instead interferes with folic acid metabolism in some way, resulting in a physiological folic acid deficiency. Fortified foods merely compensate, even then barely. Incidence dropped only by 30% since fortification began. This means either fortification is inadequate, or whatever other factor is still strong enough to overwhelm fortification, or both.

Wouldn't it be ironic if the very foods we fortify are the same that interfere with folic acid metabolism? If so, then a low-carb diet - which omits these fortified foods - should actually improve rather than worsen the problem. Consider wheat flour, it's fortified with a few things, but there's no problem with any of those with low-carb, aside from folic acid if we are to believe the paper here. Well, cutting out wheat is probably the most noticeable thing we do on low-carb in terms of beneficial effects. There's even a book called Wheat Belly. If it was more accurate, it would be called Fortified Wheat Belly, cuz that wheat flour we cut out, it's fortified, ya?

Finally, fortification also suggests that the foods we used to eat before they were fortified, weren't actually good for us to begin with. The common argument in favor of fortification even says so - milling destroys or removes certain nutrients. A few exceptions perhaps - salt fortified with iodine for example. Salt is essential, so is iodine. I wonder if there is such a thing as fortified meat or fortified veggies. I mean, we got processed meat made with wheat flour and Ceasar salad made with croutons, maybe all that wheat makes it better for us. Nah.

Diet doctor's take on the study:

https://www.dietdoctor.com/can-keto...t-birth-defects

Jean

I think the Diet doctor has it right. It's hard to say from an observational study what was going on, of the 5 percent with the lowest carbohydrate intake, how may were actually on an Atkins type plan? A lot of the time in observation studies, "low carb" just means a higher percentage of the person's calories came as fat. Take the standard diet and just replace some of the non-fat calories with fat, and when it comes to water soluble vitamins, minerals etc. it really is becoming less nutrient dense. The problem with the argument vs. high fat diets being less nutrient dense isn't that they don't have a point--even just switching from bread to donuts, what non-fat soluble nutrition is in there is diluted by the fat and sugar. It's just that there's no end to the broccoli, spinach, peppers, liver etc. that can be added in to a high fat diet (hopefully not to donuts), so the real problem is the lack of those nutrients, not the presence of non-carbohydrate calories.

While low carbing I did take a multi-vitamin with folic acid as routinely recommended for women just to be on the safe side even though I didn't consider myself to be "childbearing age" anymore. I did have a surprise pregnancy resulting in a healthy outcome. Everything might have gone fine regardless, but I was glad I had taken the vitamins.

Actually, low carb is so beneficial to women with PCOS that they are reminded they need to step up their birth control efforts if they don't want to get pregnant.

Looks like you inadvertently felt that effect!