Legislation for the mandatory fortification of bread with folic acid will be in place by the end of the year, a conference on Irish dietary habits has been told.
The same legislation will also provide for the setting up of a congenital birth defects register, Dr Mary Flynn, chief specialist in public health nutrition with the Food Safety Authority of Ireland (FSAI), said.
Folic acid, when taken by women before and during pregnancy, can help reduce the risk of babies developing a neural tube defect such as spina bifida. The Republic has one of the highest rates of such defects in Europe. About 1 to 1.5 in every 1,000 births are affected, or up to 93 children a year.
The mandatory fortification of bread with folic acid was the principal recommendation of a Government report on the issue published last year, but legislation was needed before the measure could be introduced.
"Unlike many other reports that are written, this report is not staying on the shelf and the work of the implementation group on folic acid is under way to ensure the recommendations are delivered on within a year," Dr Flynn told the conference, which was organised by the FSAI, Safefood and the Food Standards Agency of Northern Ireland.
Dr Flynn said consultation had established that while most people favoured the mandatory addition of folic acid to bread, a minority were opposed and believed the decision should be left to the consumer. As a result, the working group implementing last year's report had decided that it should be added to most but not all breads. For technical reasons, it was likely that folic acid would be added to flour rather than being mixed in during bread manufacture.
Folic acid is a B vitamin and it has been proven that taking it for four weeks before and 12 weeks after a woman conceives can help reduce the risk of her having a child with a neural tube defect.
However, because close to half of all pregnancies in the Republic are unplanned, many women are not taking folic acid before conceiving.
Some cereals are already fortified, while certain foods such as green leafy vegetables are also high in folic acid. However, women of childbearing age only get an average of 30 micrograms of folic acid a day in their diet.
The optimal level to help reduce the risk of neural tube defects is 400 micrograms a day.