If We Have to Fortify Our Food With Synthetic Nutrients, Are We Asking the Wrong Question?
From December 2026, most white wheat flour produced in the UK will be fortified with synthetic folic acid.
The stated aim is to prevent around 200 pregnancies a year being affected by neural tube defects.
That matters. Those are real families. Real tragedies worth preventing.
But when I read that announcement, I didn't feel reassured. I felt uncomfortable. Because the solution we've landed on is medicating the entire population — men, children, older adults, people who will never be pregnant — through a staple food most people don't even think twice about eating.
And apparently that felt more achievable than making sure women have access to genuinely nutritious food before they conceive.
That's worth sitting with.
This isn't an argument against folate
Let's be straight about that. Folate is essential. The evidence for its role in early pregnancy is not in dispute. This isn't an anti-science piece.
It's a question about defaults.
Because when the answer to a nutritional gap is to add a synthetic version of a nutrient back into a refined, processed food and call it solved — we've skipped about fifteen steps. We've accepted, without much debate, that population-wide fortification is a more realistic goal than actually improving the food environment people are living in.
That's a significant thing to accept quietly.
The food system isn't broken by accident
Here's what the fortification conversation tends to sidestep: the nutrients were there to begin with.
Folate is abundant in dark leafy greens, legumes, eggs, liver. Foods that have been part of human diets for thousands of years. Foods that, for a significant portion of the UK population, are either unaffordable, inaccessible, or so far outside their daily eating habits that no amount of public health messaging has shifted the needle.
So rather than seriously addressing why that is — the cost of fresh produce, the collapse of cooking skills across generations, the absence of real nutrition education, the food desert problem that never really goes away — we're adding a synthetic nutrient to flour.
It will probably help some people. It will also be invisible to most of them.
More nutrients ≠ better nutrition
The food industry has become extraordinarily good at this sleight of hand.
Vitamin-enriched cereals. Fortified breads. Added fibre. Added protein. High in B vitamins. Source of iron. It fills labels and it reassures people. And occasionally, genuinely, it helps.
But real food is not a delivery vehicle for isolated compounds. It's a complex matrix of thousands of naturally occurring substances — polyphenols, fibre, antioxidants, beneficial fats, plant chemicals, live microbes — that interact in ways we still don't fully understand, let alone replicate. Putting one synthetic vitamin back into refined flour doesn't make refined flour a health food. It makes it a slightly less depleted processed food.
That distinction matters.
The choice question
Most people won't know this change is happening. There's been no campaign, no public conversation, no moment where someone said — here's what we're doing and here's why, do you have questions?
Some people actively choose foods without synthetic additives. Some are already taking supplements and will now be getting the same nutrient stacked from multiple sources without realising it. Some have medical conditions that affect how they process folic acid.
The assumption built into fortification is that population benefit outweighs individual consideration. That might be defensible as a policy position. But it deserves to be said out loud rather than just implemented quietly.
What we believe at Enriched Being
We're growers. We think about food from the ground up — literally.
And our position is pretty unfashionable: prevention starts before you ever need a supplement. It starts with what you grow, what you eat, how your gut is functioning, how your body is actually absorbing what you put into it.
That doesn't mean supplements are useless. It doesn't mean fortification is always wrong. It means that if the answer to widespread nutritional deficiency is always "add it back in later," we are permanently treating symptoms and never asking why people are deficient in the first place.
The folic acid decision is small in isolation. But the principle it represents is not.
We've built a food system that strips nutrients out and then markets their return as innovation. That should bother us more than it does.