Study Links Ultra-Processed Foods to Diabetes and Mortality Rates

Summary

Recent research sug­gests that the con­sump­tion of ultra-processed foods may lead to the emer­gence of type 2 dia­betes and increased mor­tal­ity rates, with cer­tain food addi­tive com­bi­na­tions poten­tially pos­ing health risks. A study con­ducted in France iden­ti­fied five com­mon food addi­tive mix­tures asso­ci­ated with a higher inci­dence of type 2 dia­betes, inde­pen­dent of over­all diet qual­ity, while a sep­a­rate analy­sis across eight coun­tries indi­cated that increased con­sump­tion of ultra-processed foods was linked to a higher risk of pre­ma­ture mor­tal­ity.

Recent research links the emer­gence of type 2 dia­betes and increases in mor­tal­ity rates to the con­sump­tion of ultra-processed foods.

According to a study, com­bin­ing cer­tain food addi­tives might con­sti­tute a breed­ing ground for pre­vi­ously uniden­ti­fied health con­se­quences.

Additive com­bi­na­tions are com­mon in ultra-processed food as they increase shelf life and deter­mine the tex­ture, taste and appear­ance of many pack­aged prod­ucts.

The research is part of a broad ongo­ing inves­ti­ga­tion about health and diet pro­moted by the French National Institute for Health and Medical Research.

The study pub­lished in PLOS Medicine inves­ti­gated the eat­ing habits of more than 108,000 French adults over seven years.

All par­tic­i­pants pro­vided exten­sive infor­ma­tion at base­line, includ­ing lifestyle, health sta­tus, health his­tory and med­ical treat­ments, dietary habits, phys­i­cal activ­ity level as well as basic infor­ma­tion such as age, sex, height and weight, smok­ing sta­tus, num­ber of chil­dren and pro­fes­sional occu­pa­tion.

Participants pro­vided exten­sive dietary records at base­line and every six months, and daily dietary intakes for nutri­ents, energy, food and food addi­tives were cal­cu­lated.

These records, along with the com­mer­cial brand names of the indus­trial prod­ucts, allowed researchers to quan­tify the food addi­tives ingested by par­tic­i­pants. The researchers found a list of 269 food addi­tives being con­sumed.

“To obtain a reli­able esti­mate of food addi­tive expo­sure and to focus on those most likely to have sub­stan­tial pub­lic health impact, only those con­sumed by at least five per­cent of the cohort were included in the mix­ture mod­el­ing,” the sci­en­tists wrote.

This mod­el­ing allowed researchers to iden­tify five food addi­tive mix­tures that were most com­monly con­sumed.

Two of these mix­tures were asso­ci­ated with a higher inci­dence of type 2 dia­betes, inde­pen­dently of the nutri­tional qual­ity of the over­all diet of the sur­veyed con­sumers.

“The first mix­ture pri­mar­ily con­sisted of emul­si­fiers, preser­v­a­tives and a dye, while the sec­ond mix­ture was char­ac­ter­ized by acid­i­fiers, acid reg­u­la­tors, dyes, arti­fi­cial sweet­en­ers and emul­si­fiers,” the researchers wrote.

To pin­point the emer­gence of type 2 dia­betes, sci­en­tists used Cox pro­por­tional haz­ards regres­sion mod­els.

These are sta­tis­ti­cal tools com­monly used in epi­demi­o­log­i­cal stud­ies to ana­lyze the asso­ci­a­tion between expo­sures (like food addi­tives) and the time until an event occurs, such as the inci­dence of type 2 dia­betes.

These mod­els were adjusted for poten­tial socio-demo­graphic, anthro­po­met­ric, lifestyle and dietary con­founders.

According to the researchers, the results sug­gest that food addi­tives found in var­i­ous prod­ucts and fre­quently con­sumed together may rep­re­sent a risk fac­tor for type 2 dia­betes.

They warned that more research should be con­ducted to inves­ti­gate indi­vid­ual addi­tives’ rel­a­tive influ­ence and inter­ac­tions.

The study’s lim­i­ta­tions include pos­si­ble expo­sure and out­come mea­sure­ment errors, and causal­ity can­not be estab­lished based on this obser­va­tional study alone.

A sec­ond study, con­ducted by researchers in eight coun­tries char­ac­ter­ized by dif­fer­ent income lev­els, sug­gested that ultra-processed food con­sump­tion might cause pre­ma­ture mor­tal­ity in vary­ing degrees world­wide.

The research, pub­lished in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, aimed to esti­mate the asso­ci­a­tion between ultra-processed food con­sump­tion and all-cause mor­tal­ity and quan­tify the share of pre­ma­ture deaths attrib­ut­able to ultra-processed foods in these coun­tries in a pop­u­la­tion between 30 and 69 years of age.

The researchers con­ducted a dose – response meta-analy­sis using data from seven prospec­tive cohort stud­ies involv­ing 239,982 par­tic­i­pants and 14,779 deaths.

This kind of meta-analy­sis takes into account exist­ing stud­ies to iden­tify how changes in the amount (dose) of an expo­sure (such as a food, nutri­ent, drug or behav­ior) are related to changes in the risk or effect of an out­come (such as dis­ease, death or recov­ery).

Using a ran­dom-effects model, the authors cal­cu­lated the pooled rel­a­tive risk of all-cause mor­tal­ity for every ten per­cent increase in the daily energy intake from ultra-processed foods.

According to the mod­els, this method­ol­ogy allowed the researchers to account for study vari­a­tions.

Then, using dietary intake data from national nutri­tion sur­veys and mor­tal­ity data from the Global Burden of Disease Study, they esti­mated the pop­u­la­tion attrib­ut­able frac­tions of pre­ma­ture deaths due to ultra-processed food con­sump­tion in Colombia, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States.

The Global Burden of Disease Study is a large inter­na­tional research ini­tia­tive that mea­sures and com­pares the impact of dis­eases, injuries and risk fac­tors on pop­u­la­tion health world­wide.

The meta-analy­sis revealed a lin­ear rela­tion­ship: each ten per­cent increase in ultra-processed food con­sump­tion was asso­ci­ated with a 2.7 per­cent increase in the risk of all-cause mor­tal­ity.

Ultra-processed food intake var­ied widely, from 15 per­cent of indi­vid­ual energy intake in Colombia to 54.5 per­cent in the U.S.

The impact of pre­ma­ture deaths linked to ultra-processed food con­sump­tion var­ied sig­nif­i­cantly among coun­tries, from 3.9 per­cent in Colombia to nearly 14 per­cent in the U.K. and the U.S.

However, the study has lim­i­ta­tions, such as a nar­row num­ber of cohort stud­ies based on com­mon cri­te­ria and con­found­ing data that could emerge in obser­va­tional stud­ies being con­sid­ered.

Additionally, it does not account for the time lag between dietary changes and mor­tal­ity out­comes.

Nevertheless, accord­ing to the authors, the results align with grow­ing evi­dence link­ing ultra-processed foods to numer­ous adverse health out­comes, rein­forc­ing the urgency of address­ing their role in diet-related dis­eases.