Fresh health warning over ultra-processed foods as 30-year study warns they ... trends now
Eating too many ultra-processed foods (UPFs) may send you to an early grave, a study suggests.
Ready meals, fizzy drinks and ice creams appear to pose the greatest danger to human health.
Harvard University researchers tracked 115,000 healthy US adults over the course of three decades.
Four per cent more deaths occurred among participants who ate around seven servings of junk a day, compared against a group who ate half as much.
While the risk was only small, the team argued their findings echoed calls to limit certain types of UPFs.
The Nova system, developed by scientists in Brazil more than a decade ago, splits food into four groups based on the amount of processing it has gone through. Unprocessed foods include fruit, vegetables, nuts, eggs and meat. Processed culinary ingredients — which are usually not eaten alone — include oils, butter, sugar and salt
The umbrella term is used to cover anything edible made with colourings, sweeteners and preservatives that extend shelf life.
Ready meals, ice cream and tomato ketchup are some of the best-loved examples of products that fall under the umbrella UPF term, now synonymous with foods offering little nutritional value.
They are different to processed foods, which are tinkered to make them last longer or enhance their taste, such as cured meat, cheese and fresh bread.
Yet dietitians argue this sweeping judgement wrongly fingers 'healthy' options like fish fingers and baked beans.
The new paper adds to growing evidence illustrating the health risks of UPFs, which have been vilified for decades over their observed links to cancer and dementia.
Over the 34-year follow-up period, the researchers recorded 48,193 deaths, including more than 13,000 due to cancer and just over 11,000 attributed to cardiovascular diseases.
However, no specific relationship between UPF consumption and cancer or heart disease deaths was observed.
Instead, the elevated risk — amounting to an extra 64 deaths per every 100,000 person-years — was only seen for deaths from all causes.
They also found no link between premature death and condiments, sauces and savoury snacks.
Even with sugary drinks and ready meals, the
