CHINA- Are you an ardent lover of ultra-processed foods such as soft drinks, salty and sugary snacks, ice cream, sausage, deep-fried chicken yogurt, canned baked beans and tomatoes, ketchup, mayonnaise, packaged breads and flavoured cereals?
Well, you might want to cut down on these mouthwatering foods as a new study has linked consumption of these foods to a higher risk of developing dementia.
According to the study published in in the online issue of Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology, ultra-processed foods are associated with an increased risk of dementia.
The study also showed that replacing ultra-processed foods in a person’s diet with unprocessed or minimally processed foods was associated with a lower risk.
“Ultra-processed foods are meant to be convenient and tasty, but they diminish the quality of a person’s diet,” said study author Dr Huiping Li of Tianjin Medical University in China.
“These foods may also contain food additives or molecules from packaging or produced during heating, all of which have been shown in other studies to have negative effects on thinking and memory skills.
Its however important to note that the study does not prove that ultra-processed foods cause dementia, it only shows an association, researchers stressed.
“It’s encouraging to know that small and manageable changes in diet may make a difference in a person’s risk of dementia.”
During the study, researchers identified 72,083 people from the UK Biobank, a large database containing the health information of half a million people living in the United Kingdom.
Participants, aged 55 and older with nodementia at the start of the study, filled out at least two questionnaires in the duration of the research period including details about what they ate and drank the previous day.
They were followed for an average of 10 years. By the end of the study, 518 people were diagnosed with dementia.
From this data, researchers determined how much ultra-processed food people ate by calculating the grams per day and comparing it to the grams per day of other foods to create a percentage of their daily diet.
The researchers then divided participants into four equal groups from lowest percentage consumption of ultra-processed foods to highest.
On average, ultra-processed foods made up 9% of the daily diet of people in the lowest group, an average of 225 grams per day, compared to 28% for people in the highest group, or an average of 814 grams per day.
The main food group contributing to high ultra-processed food intake was beverages, followed by sugary products and ultra-processed dairy, the study revealed.
In the group with the lowest consumption of ultra-processed food, 105 of the 18,021 people developed dementia, a less figure compared to 150 of the 18,021 people who ate the largest amounts of ultra-processed products.
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