As the UK government has decided to add folic acid to all non-wholemeal flour from December 2026 and this has provoked a lot of controversy, including a popular (>100,000 signatures so far) petition raised by @ClareCraigPath asking for the policy to be overturned, I thought I'd try to write a thread in plain English explaining what it's all about for anyone new to the topic. I'll try to be as objective as I can and point you at scientific references so you can go and read more if you want - or if you are one of those people who only trusts "the experts" and calls anyone who reads things and thinks for themselves a "conspiracy theorist" 🙄. But if you really are an expert and find something wrong here, feel free to quibble in the comments 🙂 And I'm sure I'll miss something important so feel free to add that too... I'll try to cover these points: 1⃣What is folic acid and what is folate? 2⃣Why is folate important? 3⃣Why is it being added to non-wholemeal flour? 4⃣What are the potential benefits? 5⃣What are the potential risks? 6⃣Why is this a bad policy that needs to be overturned? 🧵1/n

A few weeks back I wrote the CEOs of the big supermarkets about the addition of synthetic folic acid to all non-wholemeal flour. The supermarkets all have to follow the law as set by Parliament of course, but, on the other hand, they have a moral obligation (and, I'd have thought, a legal one) to ensure that nothing sold in their stores constitutes a risk to the health of their customers. Their response was, as expected, disappointing. So far from Tesco I've had an automatic acknowledgement, but no detailed reply. From Aldi, a "Thank you for your feedback, it is important to us, it has been brought to the relevant manager's attention" but no detailed response. From Sainsbury's nothing yet, although I may not have the correct email address (companies are wary about making their management easily contactable). Maybe I'll send it via snail mail instead. The best response came from Morrisons, who, to their credit, sent a reply from a senior manager who at least took my concerns seriously, albeit quoting government boilerplate back at me and saying there was little they could do (which isn't actually true - what they really mean there is little they want to do because the things they should do, like a lot of things in life which are morally correct, are expensive and time-consuming). I also wrote to my MP at about the same time. An automatic acknowledgement but no actual response yet, whereas he was quite responsive over the assisted dying bill. I suppose it's been put in the "too hard" pile. Or maybe he's actually contacted the relevant ministers and they are busily copying and pasting some boilerplate text which fails to answer my points. I think it's still worth writing to all of these people. Old fashioned paper letters are worth trying too. In these days of everything being electronic, a paper letter signed with actual ink stands out from the crowd. If they think this is a minority interest, they can and will ignore it. If they get a big volume of complaint, in the end they'll do something, even if it's just for a quieter life. I'll keep persevering. In this post-democracy era, since we seemingly can't have politicians who do what we ask for, we all need to spend our time preventing them from doing things we didn't ask for.