Don’t smoke if you eat breakfast, it causes cancer.

Chances are, you started your day with a generous helping of folic acid. For more than a decade, the government has required enriched grains — most notably white flour and white rice — to be fortified with folic acid, the synthetic form of the B vitamin folate.

Indeed, many scientists have grown increasingly concerned about mounting research — including a study published last winter in the Journal of the American Medical Association — suggesting that all the extra folic acid might increase your odds of developing cancer.

If there's a nutrient it's easy to overdose on, it's folic acid. The vitamin is all around us, slipped into the cereal we eat for breakfast, the bread we eat for lunch, the energy bars we snack on, and the supplements that over one-third of us take regularly.

The risk experts worry about most: colon cancer. Last year, health officials in Chile reported that hospitalization rates for colon cancer among men and women age 45 and older more than doubled in their country since fortification was introduced in 2000. In 2007, Joel Mason, MD, director of the Vitamins and Carcinogenesis Laboratory at the Tufts University School of Medicine, described a study of the United States and Canada suggesting that rates of colon cancer rose — following years of steady decline — in the late 1990s (around the time our food was being fortified).

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35874922/ns/health-diet_and_nutrition/