Ultra-processed food and adverse health outcomes | The BMJ
▻https://www.bmj.com/content/365/bmj.l2289
Two large European cohort studies in this week’s issue 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.
[...]
The findings also have implications for policy actions such as front of pack labelling, food taxation, and restrictions on food marketing, which require an evidence informed metric to determine the “healthiness” of individual food products. Currently, decisions about individual products are based on either dietary recommendations or nutrient profiling “scores,” both of which have limitations for this purpose.9