Fifteen years after she lost her first baby to a rare and devastating birth defect, Andrea Lopez takes comfort in knowing that other Latina mothers might finally avoid the same pain.

In January, California became the first state to require food makers to add folic acid, a crucial vitamin, to corn masa flour used to make tortillas and other traditional foods widely used in her community.

It’s a long-delayed move aimed at reducing Hispanic infants’ disproportionately high rates of serious conditions called neural tube defects, which claimed Lopez’s son, Gabriel Cude, when he was 10 days old.

  • Crozekiel@lemmy.zip
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    4 months ago

    Ah, kinda like iodine in Salt. ty.

    Also, I guess I am just out of it today because I couldn’t put together from the article that it was the parent’s malnutrition somehow…

    • fallaciousBasis@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Yeaaa. Iodine deficiency makes people cognitively impaired. Really bad when a pregnant mother is deficient.

      Really annoys me when social media cooks bash iodized salt. American test kitchen did double-blind taste tests(link below)… No one could tell the difference consistently.

      Iodized all day for salt. 1 tsp of iodized salt is all you need a day!

      Here’s a pretty decent video on YT about this trend: https://youtu.be/XRcwwZXJ8gk

      People’s throats (thyroids) used to swell up like a frog from deficiency! Pretty freaky.

      • Crozekiel@lemmy.zip
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        4 months ago

        I’ve heard we have had a resurgence of iodine deficiency lately as every food influencer and their cousin push the fancier and fancier salts that often are not iodized, but I had not previously heard of people claiming iodized salt tasted bad. That’s wild.

      • teyrnon@sh.itjust.works
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        4 months ago

        An entire teaspoon? That seems like a lot. A little goes a long way especially to those of us that have cut it out of almost everything.