As you add more ultraprocessed foods to your diet, your risk of a premature death from any cause rises, according to a new meta-analysis of research involving more than 240,000 people.
“We looked at the risk of a person dying from eating more ultraprocessed foods between the ages of 30 and 69, a time when it would be premature to die,” said study coauthor Carlos Augusto Monteiro, emeritus professor of nutrition and public health in the School of Public Health at Brazil’s University of São Paulo.
“We found that for each 10% increase in total calories from ultraprocessed foods, the risk of dying prematurely rose by nearly 3%,” said Monteiro, who coined the term “ultraprocessed” in 2009 when he developed NOVA, a system of classifying foods into four groups by their level of processing.
Group one of the NOVA system is unprocessed or minimally processed foods in their natural state, such as fruits, vegetables, meat, milk and eggs. Group two includes culinary ingredients such as salt, herbs and oils. Group three consists of processed foods that combine groups one and two — canned goods and frozen vegetables are examples.
Group four includes ultraprocessed foods. By Monteiro’s definition, ultraprocessed foods contain little to no whole food. Instead, they are manufactured from “chemically manipulated cheap ingredients” and often use “synthetic additives to make them edible, palatable and habit-forming.”
“No reason exists to believe that humans can fully adapt to these products,” Monteiro cowrote in a 2024 editorial in the journal The BMJ. “The body may react to them as useless or harmful, so its systems may become impaired or damaged, depending on their vulnerability and the amount of ultra-processed food consumed.”
But the new study is misleading and will lead to consumer confusion, said Sarah Gallo, senior vice president of product policy for the Consumer Brands Association, which represents the food industry.
“Demonizing convenient, affordable and shelf ready food and beverage products could limit access to and cause avoidance of nutrient dense foods,” Gallo said in an email, “resulting in decreased diet quality, increased risk of food-borne illness and exacerbated health disparities.”
This study is not the first to find an association between negative health outcomes and small increases in ultraprocessed food.
A February 2024 study found “strong” evidence that people who ate more ultraprocessed food had a 50% higher risk of cardiovascular disease-related death and common mental disorders.
Higher intake of ultraprocessed foods might also increase the risk of anxiety by up to 53%, obesity by 55%, sleep disorders by 41%, development of type 2 diabetes by 40% and the risk of depression or an early death from any cause by 20%.
Researchers in the February study defined a higher intake as one serving or about 10% more ultraprocessed foods per day.
A May 2024 study found that adding just 10% of ultraprocessed food to an otherwise healthy diet may also increase the risk of cognitive decline and stroke, while 2023 research determined that including 10% more ultraprocessed foods was linked to a greater chance of developing cancers of the upper digestive tract.
It’s estimated that as much as 70% of the US food supply is ultraprocessed.
“Two-thirds of the calories children consume in the US are ultraprocessed, while about 60% of adult diets are ultraprocessed,” Fang Fang Zhang, associate professor and chair of the division of nutrition epidemiology and data science at Tufts University in Boston, in an earlier interview. Zhang was not involved in the new research.