While home-made food is recommended for consumption, due to our hectic lifestyle, more and more processed food is making way into our kitchen. For long, nutritionists have been warning us to cut down on these food, and now a study says that they could be a link between highly processed (“ultra-processed”) food and cancer.
So what do you mean by Ultra-processed foods?
Ultra-processed foods includes everything that you love to eat 🙂
Packaged baked goods and snacks, fizzy drinks, sugary cereals, ready meals, reconstituted meat products – often containing high levels of sugar, fat, and salt, but lacking in vitamins and fibre.
In most developed countries, these food account for up to 50% of total daily energy intake.
“To our knowledge, this study is the first to investigate and highlight an increase in the risk of overall – and specifically breast – cancer associated with ultra-processed food intake,” says the paper in the British Medical Journal.
Foods were grouped according to degree of processing and cases of cancer were identified from participants’ declarations over an average of five years. Several well known risk factors for cancer, such as age, sex, educational level, family history of cancer, smoking status and physical activity levels, were taken into account. The results showed that increase in the proportion of ultra-processed foods in the diet was associated with increases in the risk of overall cancer, including breast cancer. No significant association was found for prostate and colorectal cancers.
The researchers said that was an observational study, so no firm conclusions can be drawn about cause and effect. They suggested policies such as taxation and marketing restrictions on ultra-processed products, and promotion of fresh or minimally processed foods for primary cancer prevention.
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