| Introduction: As folate deficiency is mainly caused by the dependency on folate-poor staple crops, such as rice, the implementation of rice with a high level of natural folate could be a successful pro-rural and pro-poor intervention strategy to reduce folate deficiencies in China, where about 260 million people are considered to be folate deficient. Consuming folate biofortified rice instead of conventional rice could prevent someone from negative health outcomes of folate deficiency, such as megaloblastic aneamia and neural-tube defects. Especially for poor Chinese women of childbearing age, folate biofortification could be important to prevent them from having a baby with a neural-tube defect, the main adverse health outcome. As Northern and Southern... |
