Ultra-processed food and adverse health outcomes
Menée en Espagne à partir de données portant sur 19 899 participants âgés de 20 à 91 ans sur la période 1999-2018, cette étude de cohorte prospective analyse l'association entre une consommation d'aliments ultra-transformés et la mortalité toutes causes confondues
Résumé en anglais
Fresh evidence links popular processed foods with a range of health risks.
Over recent decades, the volume of industrially processed products in global food supplies has increased. This trend has coincided with a transition towards diets linked to a rising prevalence of obesity and non-communicable diseases in many countries.1 Among food processing classification systems investigating this phenomenon the most prominent is NOVA, which groups foods into four categories according to the extent and purpose of industrial processing involved.One such category is ultra-processed foods, defined as “formulations of food substances often modified by chemical processes and then assembled into ready-to-consume hyper-palatable food and drink products using flavours, colours, emulsifiers and . . . other cosmetic additives.”3 These foods include savoury snacks, reconstituted meat products, preprepared frozen dishes, and soft drinks.
In the 10 years since Brazilian researchers coined the term ultra-processed foods,4 there has been a growing body of evidence associating consumption of such foods with poor diet quality, increased cardiovascular risk factors (eg, dyslipidaemia, hypertension), and adverse health outcomes such as obesity and metabolic syndrome.Two large European cohort studies in this week’s issue56 find positive associations between consumption of ultra-processed foods and cardiovascular disease5 and all cause mortality.6 The authors designed their studies well, performing various sensitivity and secondary analyses, adjusting for well known sociodemographic and anthropometric risk factors and for established markers of dietary quality. These findings follow a previous study7 and a linked editorial8 reporting an association between consumption of these foods and an increased risk of cancer. (...)
