Welcome to How Humans Heal. In this episode, I’m going to help you understand the critical difference between folic acid and methylfolate, and whether you should be taking either one if you’re testing positive for high-risk HPV virus and potentially abnormal cells.

Folic Acid vs. Methylfolate: Understanding the Difference

Folic acid and methylfolate are both forms of vitamin B9. Folic acid is the synthetic form of vitamin B9, while methylfolate is the active form. Foic acid is commonly used in processed foods and many lower-quality supplements like multivitamins, prenatal vitamins, and B-complexes. 

I encourage you to take out your supplements right now and look at the back label to see what type of B9 is in there. Is it folic acid, which is the inactive form, or methylfolate, also known as folate for short, which is the active form?

Once you swallow folic acid, your body has to convert it into methylfolate, which is the form your cells can actually use. However, at least forty percent of us have at least one gene variation called MTHFR, which affects our ability to convert folic acid into folate. 

If you’re one of those people with one or more MTHFR variations, you might not be able to convert folic acid as effectively. This means you won’t get all the benefits from it.

The MTHFR Gene and How Methylfolate Works Around It

The good news is that when you take methylfolate directly, it’s like taking a detour around that whole conversion process. You’re essentially bypassing that gene variation entirely. By taking methylfolate, you’ve skipped the step that depends on your MTHFR gene, so it’s no longer an issue for you. You’re getting the active nutrient your body needs without relying on that conversion process.

I’ve been in practice for over twenty-six years, and I specialize in HPV, abnormal pap smears, women’s health, MTHFR, gene variations, and methylation issues. These are my specialties, and this is why I’m so passionate about helping people understand this topic.

Why Methylfolate Matters for HPV and Abnormal Cells

So why is it so important to consider taking methylfolate if you have abnormal cells? Methylfolate plays many critical roles in our bodies. One of the most important things it does, especially related to HPV and abnormal cells, is that folate is essential for DNA methylation. 

This means when your body uses folate along with other B vitamins, it protects your DNA, which is essential for making healthy cells. As soon as your DNA is damaged by HPV and oxidative stress, the cells become unhealthy, abnormal, and potentially cancer cells. 

If we want to prevent abnormal cells and cancer cells on your cervix and anywhere else in your body, we need to make sure you have adequate amounts of methylfolate.

But methylfolate doesn’t work alone. It works as part of what I call the B vitamin cycle, which involves all the B vitamins from B1 to B12. We can’t just take methylfolate by itself. We need to make sure methylfolate is with all the other B vitamins so they can work together to create healthy methylation for your cells.

Methylation’s Multiple Functions

Methylation is also used for helping with liver detoxification, so it’s important to have enough methylfolate and other B vitamins to support detoxification, including to detoxify estrogen. 

Estrogen, which is necessary and in many ways our friend, has to go through the liver and be detoxified. To be detoxified, it requires B vitamins, including methylfolate. If you don’t have enough methylfolate, you might not be detoxifying your estrogen well, and that might actually be increasing your risk of HPV.

Methylfolate is also used for making and breaking down neurotransmitters. Neurotransmitters are the essential messengers in our nervous system that affect our mood, energy, sleep, and focus. 

If we aren’t making enough neurotransmitters or we’re not breaking them down effectively, we might not be feeling well. We might be more likely to feel anxious, not sleep well, feel tired, or have a low mood. These factors can actually increase your risk of HPV as well.

This relates to having a healthy stress response, because one of our most important neurotransmitters is adrenaline. We need to be metabolizing adrenaline with folate and methylation so that adrenaline isn’t on high stress alert constantly.

The Research on Folate and HPV

There’s quite a lot of research showing that folate can help prevent dysplasia, which is abnormal cells caused by HPV, and cervical cancer. The original research was done on folic acid before we understood the difference and before they started researching methylfolate. 

Since the Human Genome Project was released and we learned about gene variations, we now know that it’s actually methylfolate that’s doing all that protection during pregnancy and when it comes to preventing HPV and cervical cancer.

Even though not everyone has an MTHFR gene variation, everyone is able to use methylfolate, so that is the preferred form.

Dosing Recommendations

Everyone should make sure that your multivitamin contains methylfolate, usually between four hundred and eight hundred micrograms in a daily dose. That, to me, is a minimum. I definitely recommend starting with a high-quality multivitamin containing methylfolate if you’re not already taking one. Find the multi I recommend here.

Beyond that, you could consider adding a clinical dose of methylfolate because research shows it can be beneficial for preventing dysplasia and reversing abnormal cells. That dose is usually between one milligram, which is one thousand micrograms, and ten milligrams, which is ten thousand micrograms. Find the methylfolate product I recommend here.

However, this is not a dose that everyone needs to take. Your dose depends on the severity of your case and your blood level of homocysteine. With HPV and dysplasia, we may use a clinical dose until the abnormal cells go away, and then decrease to a maintenance dose.

Testing Your Methylation Status

In regular blood work, you can ask to test folate levels, but I really warn you about this. The test isn’t actually showing you what you might think it’s showing. When the lab tests for folate in the blood, they’re testing for all forms, not just the methylfolate form. So your blood test isn’t just measuring methylfolate; you’re measuring any forms of folate, including folic acid in the inactive form, which isn’t the information we need.

What we really need to know is your homocysteine level. Homocysteine is a metabolite in the methylation cycle. When we measure homocysteine in the blood, it gives us a sense of how well your body is using the B vitamins.

 We want homocysteine to be about seven. Between six and eight would be great. If it’s above nine or ten, that indicates low methylation, and that you may benefit from additional methylfolate, however, it’s important to support methylation first. If it’s less than five or six, that indicates hypermethylation, and that you may need to support homocysteine before adding more folate.

When Methylfolate Doesn’t Feel Good

Some of you might be saying, “I tried taking methylfolate, and I felt worse.” This is a really important consideration, and you’re not alone. When this happens, it indicates that your body’s not able to use folate effectively. In other words, methylation is not working well.

I use an analogy of a sink. If your sink’s drain is clogged with inflammation, stress, and toxins, and you turn on the faucet to add extra folate, the sink’s going to fill with water but it won’t go down the drain. It can overflow, making you feel anxious, get headaches, or feel jittery. 

This means we need to address the underlying issues first, with a comprehensive approach. It doesn’t mean we give up. Instead, we need to look for causes of decreased methylation, such as toxins from your environment or gut, high levels of stress, and/or inflammation. We also need to address nutrient deficiencies, and then we can try using folate again, starting with very low doses. 

The Comprehensive Approach

The goal is to help our bodies metabolize toxins, clear out inflammation, and rebalance from stress on a daily basis so that we become healthy and never become susceptible to HPV. 

It’s important to recognize that taking methylfolate is part of a comprehensive protocol that includes a healthy diet, sleep, exercise, stress recovery, and other nutrients and herbs to help optimize your health. Taking folate alone is not a comprehensive plan.

What I find is that testing positive for HPV is often just one sign that your body is asking for attention — and going through the process of addressing HPV can help you heal from many other health issues, including anxiety, depression, migraines, sleep issues, hormone imbalances, gut issues, fertility struggles, and more. This could be your opportunity to change the way you relate to your body and your health. 

Here’s what I want you to hold onto: every single one of the susceptibilities to HPV can be tested for, addressed, and resolved. You are not powerless in this situation — quite the opposite. By asking the right questions and doing the right tests, with expert guidance, you can take real, meaningful control of your health and give your immune system exactly what it needs to protect you.

The standard medical clinic doesn’t offer specialty tests, and most practitioners aren’t trained to interpret and act on the results or to provide clinical nutritional support. But that doesn’t mean your options are limited — it means you need the right guide. I’ve helped patients around the world clear HPV and go on to feel better than they have in years, because when you rebalance your whole system, everything improves — your energy, your sleep, your mood, your resilience.

If you’d like to learn more, join me over at doctordoni.com/HPV. You can download my HPV Recovery Guide, which is a free PDF. You’ll find success cases of women who’ve use the Dr. Doni’s HPV Protocol to heal and found freedom from high-risk HPV so that you can have hope that it’s possible for you too. Every day in my practice I see women achieve a negative HPV result and keep it that way.

If you’d like to get a better sense of my approach, I welcome you to join my next free How to Get Rid of HPV online workshop where I help you to understand your results and your options to get HPV out of your life for good. 

If you are ready to start healing, can join my 30-day Heal HPV Kickstart Program, for the initial steps of my protocol, including essential diet changes and doses for clinically effective supplements.

If you would like access to ordering the testing I suggest and the vaginal suppositories I formulated, along with live, group support, then the Say Goodbye to HPV Program is the way to go. 

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to my office. My team would be happy to connect with you and help you understand your options and help you get started. My team can also help coordinate shipping worldwide. You don’t have to figure it out on your own. Click here to set up a call with my team.

Thank you so much for joining me for this video. I’d love to hear from you – please like, comment, share, and subscribe, if you haven’t already. I look forward to having you join me for the next episode of How Humans Heal.

Disclaimer: This specific article and all other Content, Products, and Services of this Website are NOT intended as, and must not be understood or construed as, medical care or advice, naturopathic medical care or advice, the practice of medicine, or the practice of counseling care, nor can it be understood or construed as providing any form of medical diagnosis, treatment,  natural HPV cure, or prevention of any disease.