Hi Reader,

My mum used to make her own bread.

She didn't like what was in the shop-bought stuff. Too many weird things she couldn't pronounce. So most weeks there'd be a loaf rising on the side, flour dust on the counter, her hands working the dough the way her own mother probably taught her.

She thought she was doing the right thing.

For most of her life, something was wrong.

Not one big obvious thing. A drip feed of smaller ones. Tired in a way sleep didn't touch. Weight that wouldn't shift no matter what she did. Aches nobody could explain.

Then something else.

Then something else again.

Looking back, I think I know what it was. I think my mum had undiagnosed hypothyroidism, maybe Hashimoto's, from around the time she was pregnant with me. I think the same thing happened to me. Pregnancy pushed my thyroid into failure too. It took me ten years to get diagnosed. I got the blood test eventually, the medication, the answer.

My mum never did.

When she was around 60, she finally got a diagnosis. Pernicious anaemia. An autoimmune condition where the body stops absorbing B12 properly.

I remember how it was explained to her. Nothing you can do about this one. Just come in for your B12 jabs every few months.

That was it. Nobody mentioned autoimmunity. Nobody asked whether anything else might be going on, or connected it to decades of unexplained tiredness that came before it. Nobody told her what to eat, what to watch for, or that this condition tends to travel in company with others just like it.

So she carried on.

Cereal in the morning. A sandwich at lunch. Toast when she fancied something easy.

And that wonderful and delicious bread, made at home, because at least she knew what was going into it.

She thought she was doing everything right.

Autoimmune conditions don't tend to stop at one. Once your body starts attacking a part of itself, it's more likely to start attacking somewhere else too. That's exactly why pernicious anaemia turns up so often alongside Hashimoto's.

For my mum, it didn't stop there either. Years later she developed another autoimmune disease.

Dermatomyositis. It's what eventually lead to her death.

I don't say that to be dramatic. I say it because I don't think people always realise how much it matters not to keep adding fuel to an autoimmune fire that's already lit. One condition can lead to another. For my mum, it did.

Here's what I keep thinking about.

Flour was never really innocent for people like us in the first place. Gluten and grains are already known to stir up the kind of inflammation that Hashimoto's doesn't need any more of. That's before this new addition. Now there's one more thing going into the same flour, for a body that's already fighting itself.

From this December, UK law will require folic acid to be added to almost all non-wholemeal flour. Not folate, the natural version. Folic acid, the synthetic one. It'll be in shop bread, in cereal, in sausages, in gravy, in anything made with flour. And it isn't only factory flour either. The bag you'd buy to bake at home carries it too, unless you specifically seek out wholemeal, rye, spelt, or stoneground.

My mum wouldn't have known to look for that. Why would she. Nobody had ever told her anything about what her own body could or couldn't handle.

Because here's the part that actually gets me. The government's own scientific advisers on food safety have said, in their own words, that folic acid can mask B12 deficiency in people with pernicious anaemia. The anaemia looks like it's improving. The nerve damage keeps happening underneath, unchecked, because the one sign that would have caught it early is gone.

That's not a fringe theory. That's the UK's own advisory committee.

And this isn't some rare pairing. Low B12 and pernicious anaemia turn up in people with Hashimoto's and hypothyroidism far more than they do anywhere else. If you've already got one autoimmune condition, this is exactly the kind of thing you're more likely to be carrying too, diagnosed or not.

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My mum had pernicious anaemia.

She'd have been in exactly the group this concerns. And she would have had no idea, because nobody along the way ever gave her that information. She'd have kept eating her cereal, her toast, her home baked bread, believing she was looking after herself. And she'd have been doing herself a little more damage instead.

I just want to talk about something else that's important.

I had a friend growing up. Andrea. She had spina bifida. She didn't get much of a life. She died at seventeen. I think about her more than people probably realise, and I would do anything to stop another family going through what hers did.

So I understand why this policy exists. Preventing neural tube defects is a real good thing, and folic acid does help with that, for the people who choose to take it before and during early pregnancy.

But that's the part I keep coming back to.

Choice.

My mum never got the chance to choose.

Nobody ever gave her the information to choose with. And now, without meaning to, she'd have been fed the one thing she was quietly supposed to be careful of, through the foods she trusted most.

That's not fortification to me. That's just more of the same thing that happened to her for sixty years. Nobody telling her what was actually going on in her own body.

There's something properly unfair about medicating an entire population through food when whole groups of people have already been told, officially, to be careful with the exact thing being added.

It doesn't take choice away from everyone equally.

It takes it away hardest from the people already living with a condition that puts them at risk. Multiply that across an entire country's flour supply and the consequences land on people who never had any warning it was coming.

That's exactly why this matters to you, right now, reading this.

I'd bet you didn't know this was even happening. Did you?

It's the kind of thing that quietly becomes law while everyone's attention is somewhere else, and by the time anyone notices, it's already in the bread.

Knowing what's actually happening before it lands in your kitchen isn't something you get by accident.

It's something you have to go looking for, or be part of a room where someone's already looking for you.

That's worth more than people think, especially when it's your own body on the line.

P.S. My mum was never given this information. That's why I built my group, the Hypothyroid Recovery Hub, so the people in it aren't sleepwalking through the same thing she did. There's a free trial week if you want to see what it's actually like before it costs you anything: after that, it's just the price of a coffee ❤️https://www.skool.com/hypothyroid/about​

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