Folic acid – The essential vitamin B9: importance, deficiency and high-quality supplementation
Folic acid (folate) is one of the B vitamins, is water-soluble, and also known as vitamin B9. This particular vitamin cannot be produced by the body and must therefore be regularly consumed through food. Unfortunately, even a balanced diet often does not adequately cover the folate requirement, as many people are unable to absorb or metabolize the folate ingested through food. Furthermore, many foods (especially green foods like vegetables and salad) nowadays contain hardly any folate, and this sensitive vitamin is often destroyed by heat and water before it can be absorbed through food.
This creates a need for dietary supplements that can compensate for this deficiency. These supplements contain the synthetic form of folate, folic acid. This form of folate is stable and can be precisely dosed as a dietary supplement. However, there are important things to consider here, and there are significant differences in quality.
L-methylfolate vs. folic acid
Folic acid is the synthetically produced form of folate, while methylfolate (or L-methylfolate) is the methylated form of folic acid and thus the most bioactive, highly bioavailable form. The Quatrefolic® L-methylfolate we use has a purity of at least 99.9% and is considered one of the highest quality premium raw materials of its kind.
In everyday language, there is often no distinction made between these forms, even though they are clearly different.
Folic acid (also known as naturally occurring folate) is biologically inactive and must therefore first be converted into the metabolically active L-methylfolate or 5-methyltetrahydrofolate (5-MTHF) in a multi-step process. A prerequisite for this conversion is that the body can produce a specific enzyme that enables the conversion of folic acid to L-methylfolate. Studies show that a large proportion of the world's population does not produce this enzyme (or does not produce enough of it), meaning that the folic acid consumed cannot be converted into the active L-methylfolate form. L-methylfolate is the reduced or methylated form of folic acid, which is optimally absorbed by the body. It is immediately active and therefore immediately available to the body, as it requires no prior conversion.