January is Folic Acid Awareness & Birth Defects Prevention Month

BE Your Best with Folic Acid

Folic acid is a B vitamin that can help you BE your best! It’s used for the growth and repair of every cell in your body.

You lose up to 40,000 dead skin cells every minute of the day. You shed 50 to 100 strands of hair each day.
All day, every day your body works hard to replace all those lost cells.

Start a healthy habit. Get enough folic acid each and every day! Your body needs folic acid as you grow. Folic acid can help prevent very serious birth defects in babies. Each year in the US about 3,000 babies will have serious birth defects of the spine (spina bifida) or brain (anencephaly). At least 1, 000 of these babies could be born healthy each year if women got enough folic acid before pregnancy and in the first weeks that they are pregnant.

Eat plenty of fruits and vegetables and do one of the following each day: Take a vitamin that has folic acid in it every day. Or eat breakfast cereal that has 100% of the daily value of folic acid every day.

BE your Best! Take Folic acid every day! BE your Best for Life! For more information about folic acid, visit: www.cdc.gov