California legislators are making it a requirement for tortillas in the state to have an additive that over a fourth of the population likely cannot process. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is furious.
Cal Matters reported that tortillas in California must now legally include folic acid, which is supposed to assist infant health. Big Brother legislators are trying to give the acid to Latina mothers whether they want to take it or not, asserting that they will thus prevent birth defects. But the problem is that people with a specific and not uncommon gene mutation, one that is more prevalent among Hispanics, cannot always process folic acid.
Brownstone Institute’s Toby Rogers angrily posted, “California Democrats are the dumbest legislators in American history. Adding folic acid to tortillas, that no one asked for, will be a public health catastrophe. People with the MTHFR genetic mutations CANNOT process folic acid and it becomes toxic in their bloodstream.”
HHS Secretary Kennedy responded to Rogers and agreed with his argument. “This is insanity. California is waging war against her children- targeting the poor and communities of color,” Kennedy insisted.
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The most common MTHFR mutations are C677T and A1298C. Medical News Today reported the results of a 2019 study that indicated “around 47% of people of Hispanic descent and 36% of Europeans are carriers of the C677T variant,” along with “43% of people of South East Asian descent.”
That is a whole lot of people in California who probably will not be able to process the new additive adequately. In California, as of last July, almost 70% of the population was white (European descent) with 40% of them being Hispanic, per the Census Bureau. In other words, most Californians fall into the category of between 36% and 47% being at risk from the new additive.
WebMD explains the science behind Kennedy and Rogers’s frustration:
The MTHFR gene mutation is a variation in the MTHFR gene. This gene normally tells your body how to make the MTHFR protein. You need this protein to process folate, which helps your body make DNA…If you have an MTHFR gene mutation, your body may not break down folate as well as it should. This leads to increased levels of homocysteine, which potentially could cause health problems.
The danger with leftists is that they always believe they know better than nature and nature‘s God. Furthermore, they always insist upon imposing one-size-fits-all solutions that often cause more problems for more people. The worst example of this was the COVID-19 debacle, where the lives of all Americans were temporarily or permanently damaged because of a virus with a 99% survival rate. And of course, California was the worst state of all for the destructive lockdowns.
Kennedy is right — this new California law is racist paternalism at its worst. In an effort to coerce a specific ethnic group into taking an additive that legislators consider helpful, those legislators are actually putting a significant percentage of that ethnic group at risk — along with numerous Americans of other ethnicities.
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