Folic Acid in Huel?

On my Huel bag and the site, it says the product contains L-Methylfolate but the nutrition breakdown says Folate then has (folic acid) underneath it in parentheses. Does Huel contain folic acid or is that just there for frame of reference for folks that don’t know what folate is?

Reaching back into my old pharmacology section of my brain, i think the Methylfolate is an “activated” form of folic acid. What we typically think of as folic acid is really a precursor that has to be activated in our cells. I think the Huel people just include the activated form in Huel and list this as their folic acid. 99% of people can easily convert folic acid into L-methylfolate, but if they want to include the active form itself in the product, that’ll work too. (as a side note, “folate” is a term that used synonymously with folic acid, although technically folate would be the conjugate base of folic acid.)

Did you know that some antibiotics (trimethoprim) work by inhibiting activation of bacterial folic acid? And the drug Methotrexate works by doing that in human cells, which results in suppression of immune cells and various bone marrow components. We administer Leucovorin, another activated form of Folic Acid, to patients on high dose Methotrexate chemo regimens.

And that is waaaaaaay more info than anyone needs to know. Simple answer: L-Methylfolate is activated folic acid.

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Thanks, doing some research. I have the MTHFR mutation and am on the fence about consuming actual folic acid. Waiting on a physical with the doc but that’s like 2 months away, but at that point we should know if the mutation is actually doing anything

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Huel contains no added folic acid: only L-methylfolate calcium. The way we have that on our labels is confusing and we’ll be revising that soon.

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