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Introduction
Folate or vitamin B
9
is one of the essential, water soluble, micronutrient that plays a
significant role in DNA synthesis during cell growth and development. In milk, endogenous
folate predominantly occurs as 5Ͳmethyltetrahydrofolate (5ͲMTHF). Folic acid (FA), the
synthetic folate vitamer, is added to the adult nutritional and infant milk formula to increase
the folate dietary intake.
The current official AOAC method to measure folate is based on the triͲenzyme extraction in
conjunction with the microbiological assay. Microbiological assay determines the total
folate in foods, thus it does not distinguish each folate vitamer. There is no
recommendation on the upper limit of intake for naturally occurring folate, in contrast, the
upper limit of FA intake is set at 1000 μg. In light of this, accurate determination of FA in
adult nutritional and infant formula becomes important, especially when infant formula is
the most heavily regulated commodity. Also, milk formula is one of the complex matrices to
process and analyse, and disputes in acquiring data is common.
In this study we present a method for measuring FA and 5ͲMTHF in adult/infant nutritional
formula based on the Standard Method Performance Requirements.
Fol-20 (February 2016)
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