This is one of two large European cohort studies published in BMJ that found positive associations between consumption of ultra-processed foods and cardiovascular disease and all-cause mortality. A French study (n=105 159) reported an absolute increment of 10 in the percentage of ultra-processed foods in the diet was associated with a >10% increase in the rates of overall cardiovascular, coronary heart, and cerebrovascular diseases.
An editorial suggests these findings add to growing evidence of an association between ultra-processed food and adverse health outcomes that has important implications for dietary advice and food policies. It notes the dietary advice is relatively straightforward: eat less ultra-processed food and more unprocessed or minimally processed food. It adds that 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, as currently, decisions about individual products are based on either dietary recommendations or nutrient profiling “scores,” both of which have limitations for this purpose.