Ultra-Processed Foods Linked to a Dramatically Increased Risk of Dementia

The study also found that replacing these foods with healthier options can lower your risk of dementia.

Recent studies in the journal Neurology suggest that those who consume the most ultra-processed meals, like soft drinks, chips, and cookies, may be more likely to develop dementia than those who consume the least of these items. Researchers also found a link between a person's risk and replacing ultra-processed foods with unprocessed or minimally processed foods in their diet. The study does not establish a link between highly processed foods and dementia. It only displayed an association.

Foods that have undergone extreme processing are high in added sugar, fat, and salt but poor in protein and fiber. Some examples of ultra-processed meals include soft drinks, salty and sugary snacks, ice cream, sausage, deep-fried chicken, yogurt, canned tomatoes and baked beans, ketchup, mayonnaise, packaged guacamole and hummus, packaged bread, and flavored cereals.

According to research author Huiping Li, Ph.D., of Tianjin Medical University in China, "Ultra-processed meals are designed to be convenient and pleasant, yet they impair the quality of a person's diet." These foods could potentially include food additives, chemicals from packaging, or compounds created during heating, all of which have been linked to impaired thinking and memory in prior studies. In addition to showing that highly processed meals raise the risk of dementia, our research also indicated that swapping them out for healthier alternatives may lower that risk.

From the UK Biobank, a sizable database including health information on 500,000 people in the UK, researchers selected 72,083 people for the study. Participants in the trial had to be 55 or older and were free of dementia at the start. They were monitored for ten years on average. At the end of the study, dementia had been diagnosed in 518 people.

The study subjects filled out at least two questionnaires about their diet and beverage intake the day prior. Researchers determined the grams of ultra-processed food each person consumed daily and compared it to the grams of other foods to determine what percentage of the daily diet was made up of those foods. The participants were then divided into four equal groups, ranging in proportion of ultra-processed food intake from lowest to highest.

In the lowest category, ultra-processed foods made up 9% of daily diets, or 225 grams, while in the highest category, they made up 28% of daily diets, or 814 grams. One serving of pizza or fish sticks weighed 150 grams. Drinks were the main food group that contributed to a high consumption of ultra-processed foods, followed by sweet foods and ultra-processed dairy.

105 of the 18,021 individuals in the lowest group acquired dementia, as opposed to 150 of the 18,021 individuals in the highest group.

Researchers discovered that for every 10% increase in daily consumption of ultra-processed foods, participants had a 25% increased risk of dementia after controlling for age, gender, family history of dementia and heart disease, among other variables that potentially affect the risk of dementia.

Researchers also calculated the effects of replacing 10% of ultra-processed meals with unprocessed or minimally processed foods, such as fresh fruit, vegetables, legumes, milk, and meat, using study data. They discovered that such a change was linked to a 19% decreased incidence of dementia.

"Our findings also show that increasing unprocessed or minimally processed foods by only 50 grams per day—equivalent to half an apple, a serving of corn, or a bowl of bran cereal—while simultaneously reducing ultra-processed foods by 50 grams per day—equivalent to a chocolate bar or a serving of fish sticks—is associated with a 3% lower risk of dementia," Li said. Knowing that one's risk of dementia may be affected by minor, doable dietary modifications is heartening.

Li noted that further research is needed to confirm the findings.

While nutrition research has begun to focus on food processing, Maura E. Walker, Ph.D., of Boston University in Massachusetts, wrote an editorial that was published alongside the study. She stated, "The challenge is categorizing such foods as unprocessed, minimally processed, processed, and ultra-processed. Foods like soup, for instance, would be categorized differently if they were canned vs homemade. Additionally, the degree of processing is not always consistent with the caliber of the diet. High-quality plant-based burgers could also be overly processed. We must take into account the possibility that more thorough dietary assessments will be needed as we work to better understand the complexity of dietary intake.

Milder cases of dementia may have gone unnoticed because the study's cases of dementia were established by reviewing hospital records and death registries rather than primary care data.

Reference: Huiping Li, Shu Li, Hongxi Yang, Yuan Zhang, Shunming Zhang, Yue Ma, Yabing Hou, Xinyu Zhang, Kaijun Niu, Yan Borné, and Yaogang Wang, "Association of Ultraprocessed Food Consumption With Risk of Dementia," Neurology, 27 July 2022. DOI: 10.1212/WNL.0000000000200871

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