We all know that ultraprocessed foods aren’t the healthiest choice, but a new study has found that some can have worse effects on your health than others.
Presented at the American Society for Nutrition meeting in early July, the research was based on over 500,000 adults whose health and lifestyle habits were tracked for over 30 years. It found that eating more ultraprocessed foods was linked to increase in death from any cause, as well as death from heart disease and diabetes.
The study findings “indicate that ultra-processed food intake adversely impacts health and longevity,” said lead author Erikka Loftfield, Ph.D., an investigator at the National Cancer Institute, in a press release.
The authors were also able to look at different types of ultraprocessed foods and list a few of those that were especially correlated with adverse health outcomes.
“We observed that highly processed meat and soft drinks were a couple of the subgroups of ultraprocessed food most strongly associated with mortality risk and eating a diet low in these foods is already recommended for disease prevention and health promotion,” Loftfield added.
This is far from the first study to find that ultaprocessed foods and meats in particular can increase risk of death. One published in The BMJ in May followed more than 100,000 people for 30 years who’d never had cancer, heart disease or diabetes. The data looked at lifestyle and dietary habits, and tracked how their health changed. Study authors concluded that eating more ultraprocessed food led to a slightly higher risk of death, but that certain types of processed foods had an especially strong link.
Ultraprocessed foods are easy to grab in the grocery store without realizing it. So what are some examples of processed foods? And how do they impact your health? Here’s what to know.
What are ultraprocessed foods?
Ultraprocessed foods have undergone an extensive transformation of the original food and often contain only extractions of it.
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