United States: A recent expert report revealed the impact of ultra-processed foods on life expectancy. A study shed startling light on several popular foods.
Ultra-processed means they have been processed more than other foods, and they contain things people don’t usually have at home, like emulsifiers or preservatives, according to the NHS.
More about the news
This research was completed with the presentation at Nutrition 2024, the American Society for Nutrition annual conference with Erikka Loftfield and colleagues from the National Cancer Institute, and the study published in the European Molecular Biology Organization, says El Espanol.
It included the diet and health information of over 540,000 people; data were also gathered from the participants in the early and mid-1990s when the respondents were aged between 50 to 71 years.
Over 60 percent of the participants have died, and the study included a comparison of mortality rates between participants who consumed higher amounts of ultra-processed foods and those who did not, and between disease-specific food consumption of the participants, getsurrey.co.uk reported.
What more are the experts stating?
According to Loftfield, meat, processed, and soft drinks were the two subgroups identified as closely associated with the risk of mortality.
In this research, diet or sugar-free soft drinks were identified by El Espanol as having the highest proportion contribution to the intake of ultra-processed foods, sugary soft drinks, and processed meats.
The study also compared other risk factors, including obesity or smoking, but the happiness percentile for processed foods seems to have a higher BMI and lower figure than the Healthy Eating Index, getsurrey.co.uk reported.
As evaluation showed, associations between consumption and increased mortality remained unmediated by these variables.