Burned out folate receptors - why you need high dose methylfolate?

[garyfritz]

@PennyIA, you can still enjoy baked goods if you're careful. Not all flour products are fortified. You can buy non-enriched flour for your own baking, and some products (notably organic breads, if I understand correctly) are not required to be fortified. Check the label. Of course, you'll still have the gluten to deal with.

I used to enjoy cereal for breakfast, and I recently started eating that again. Then I looked at the cereal I'd bought, and I ended up throwing some of it away. Too much sugar AND too much folic acid. But certain "simple" cereals (shredded wheat, Uncle Sam, etc) are available without added folic acid.

@liverock, thanks for the info. I might have low stomach acid and I do test positive for HP. I've been taking 2*400mcg Solgar (just swallowing the pills) plus 400mcg contained in the Douglas Labs B complex. When I've had problems in the night that methyl folate helped, I was always taking the folate sublingually. I think I'll try taking my twice-daily Solgars sublingually and see if that changes anything.

 

[Freddd]

I think there are a few things to keep in mind about this whole discussion. Folic acid does not exist in the human body without somebody putting it in. The body doesn't make it. It is an accident that folic acid works at all for anybody. Our bodies never evolved to utilize it. So here is a question that is significant. What is the total amount of folate an average body utilizes, optimally. It has no relationship at all to the 400mcg or 800mcg doses which were chosen for reasons of protecting people from themselves and the 800mcg was at the upper limit of what the 50% of bodies can convert. Then there are plenty of folks that have low cellular folate because of genetic factors, such as CblC diseases and whatever MTHR polymorphisms may affect it.

My experience with folic acid when I was doing stop and start trials early in my methylfolate trials is that it can take several days for folic acid to build up until it interferes and several days to go away.

Methylfolate appears to follow a reasonably normal effectiveness curve. Starting at perhaps 200mcg each doubling of dose produces less change of effect than the previous one. I would guess that for me the limit is reached at about 30mg, the top of the Deplin study. Since getting to about 4mg or so I have had regular periods of near sufficiency to sudden deficiency. As the dose has gone up the intensity of the sudden deficiency has been shedding symptoms as they each fade away at a different rate. I haven't had any angular cheilitis in a number of months, my MCV has come down a little but is still coming down and appears to indicate what percentage of time I have folate sufficiency. Somehow blood comes in low on the folate triage level. This is direct cell growth and when it comes back on (hypothetical explanation) my potassium drops (pattern) as the excess water of edema is shed. Now is the effect on potassium more excretion, more cell growth or both?