Methyl folate - folic acid
Vitamin B9 is known as folic acid. It should be noted that folic acid does not occur in nature, in food products, nor in our body. Folic acid is a completely foreign substance. So-called folates occur in nature (in food products of vegetable - but also animal - origin), and/or - since the ingested food folates are transformed into methyl folates in animals (and in people, as well), food products of animal origin - besides folates - also contain methyl folate, as well. Methyl folate is the active formula, so the only thing that matters is how much methyl folate is contained in our body.
Folic acid is used in various dietary supplements, medications to enrich food products, in cereals, etc., because folate is unstable, so it can only be contained in fresh food.
Folate could be extracted and put in capsules, but by the time of reaching the user, it would decompose and have no effect. Folic on the other hand is a stable form, and with the help of enzymes, in the ideal case, it is transformed into folate, and then into methyl folate. The problem is that nearly 90 per cent of the people have problems with the utilization of folic acid, while 60 per cent have significant problems, these are people with the so-called MTHFR gene variant. Approximately 10 per cent of the people are able to transform 100 per cent of the folic acid into folate and then the folate into methyl folate, whereas 60 per cent of people are hardly capable of transforming it, or are not capable at all. They may have folate deficiency even in the case if they ingest a sufficient quantity of folate (e.g. by eating plenty of vegetables) because only a small part of the active form of methyl folate is transformed. On the other hand, folate cannot do any harm, the worst it can do is being useless if the sufficient quantity of it is not transformed into the active methyl folate. On the other hand, it may even be harmful, if we take medication/dietary supplement containing folic acid, or consume food enriched with folic acid, as at that point a large part of the folic acid is not transformed into folate, either, and such unmodified folic acid starts accumulating in our tissues and blood. This means that a foreign substance that has nothing to do with our body, starts accumulating... This is a warning sign in itself, but a correlation has been found between the level of UMFA (unmodified folic acid) and various diseases, such as colon cancer. Research on the subject has been started only recently, and who knows what else is to turn out...
That is why it is important for most people to avoid all products that contain B9 vitamin in form of folic acid. The most efficient, active and natural form of B9 is methyl folate (both its calcic salt and glucosamine salt is adequate), but folic acid (e.g. calcium folinate) is also adequate for most people, except for those with homozygous MTHFR mutation (e.g. 10 per cent of the population).
Since 200 mcg of the active methyl folate form is sufficient for anyone (even during pregnancy), but more of it would not cause any trouble, either, so our products contain 200 to 600 mcg of it (and none of the folic acid).
Ireland
