When you walk through the supermarket, you’ll find shelf after shelf of highly processed convenience foods like soda, candies, microwave boxed dinners, and chips. They “foods” are considered ultra-processed due to the extensive industrial processing depleting them of nutrients and then loading them with oil, salt, sugar, and an extensive lists of other ingredients including preservatives. Sure they taste good, but they highjack the food-reward system, leading to more consumption of these foods.
Published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, researchers from Italy’s Institute for Research, Hospitalization and Health Care (I.R.C.C.S.) Neuromed conducted a study of 22,000 participants from the Moli-sani Project where their eating habits were analyzed and followed for over 8 years.
Their results showed that consuming high amounts of ultra-processed foods lead to an increased risk of death from all cause mortality by 26% and from cardiovascular disease by 58%. And in their particular study, they linked the major contributor the excess sugar. However, they found that sugar only accounted for 40% of the increased death risk.
“Efforts aimed to lead the population towards a healthier diet can no longer be addressed only by calories counting or by vague references to the Mediterranean diet. Sure, we obtained good results by those means, but now the battlefront is moving. Young people in particular are increasingly exposed to pre-packaged foods, easy to prepare and consume, extremely attractive and generally cheap. This study, and other international researches going in the same direction, tell us that, in a healthy nutrition habit, fresh or minimally processed foods must be paramount. Spending a few more minutes cooking a lunch instead of warming a container in the microwave, or maybe preparing a sandwich for our children instead of putting a pre-packaged snack in their backpack: these are actions that will reward us over the years,” said coauthor, Licia Iacoviello.
Stop considering these highly processed food-products to be food and especially stop feeding them to your children if you care at all for their health.
M Bonaccio et al. Ultra-processed food consumption is associated with increased risk of all-cause and cardiovascular mortality in the Moli-sani Study (2020). American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
DOI: 10.1093/ajcn/nqaa299
