Expensive Pee: Folic Acid Supplements Fail Again

In another blow to the notion that B vitamin supplements ward off heart problems, a new clinical trial finds that folic acid supplements may not slow plaque buildup in healthy older adults’ arteries.

FOODS with B vitamins like folate, however, do in fact help your heart and lower your homocysteine. 

Where do you get Folate in your foods? Folate without taking pills? This is a good article.  

Here is our rule: 

pills are for sick people. Take pills if you need them, as a last resort, but otherwise you need to get your nutrition from food.  This study just confirms that the mountain of supplements you’re taking may make you feel like you’re doing something wonderful for your health, but in the end it’s just not. 

In the end, you just get really expensive pee.  

In recent years, a number of studies have been set up to test whether B vitamins can help protect older adults from heart problems and strokes.

The hope was based on the fact that B vitamins, particularly folic acid, curb levels of a blood protein called homocysteine. High levels of homocysteine have been linked to an increased risk of clogged arteries, heart attack and stroke.

But clinical trials of people with established atherosclerosis — a narrowing and hardening of the arteries that can lead to heart attacks and strokes — have failed to find a benefit of B vitamin supplements (see Reuters Health story of April 23, 2010).

This latest study, reported in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, looked at whether folic acid might stave off atherosclerosis in older adults who had high homocysteine levels but were apparently free of cardiovascular disease.

It didn’t. Over 3 years, daily folic acid cut study participants’ homocysteine levels by an average of 26 percent, but it showed no effect on the thickness of the inner wall of the carotid artery, or on the “stiffness” of the arteries — which are both considered markers of atherosclerosis.

The findings “suggest that folic acid is not effective in slowing down early stages of cardiovascular disease, as measured by accepted markers of atherosclerosis,” said senior researcher Dr. Petra Verhoef, who was with Wageningen University in the Netherlands at the time of the study.

More and more, Verhoef told Reuters Health in an email, researchers are thinking that homocysteine, itself, does not directly contribute to heart disease and stroke.

Instead, it may be more of a bystander, reflecting some sort of metabolic problem that is the actual contributor to cardiovascular ills — though that, Verhoef said, is still being studied.

For their study, Verhoef and her colleagues randomly assigned 819 adults between the ages of 50 and 70 to take either folic acid or placebo pills every day for 3 years. Those on folic acid took 800 micrograms per day — double what is generally recommended for adults.

In the end, the researchers found no difference between the two groups when it came to the rate of thickening in the carotid artery wall — measured non-invasively with ultrasound. Nor was there any difference in arterial stiffness, which was also measured non-invasively.