A new study from the U.K. has found another flaw with ultraprocessed food: its link to ovarian and breast cancer among women.
Ultraprocessed foods are basically quick-grab meals or snacks — think gas-station food, chips, cookies or frozen pizza — that have added sugar, salt, fat, and artificial colors or preservatives to increase shelf life or change the texture, flavoring or coloring of foods to be more appealing, per Harvard Health Publishing.
“Our bodies may not react the same way to these ultraprocessed ingredients and additives as they do to fresh and nutritious minimally processed foods,” Kiara Chang, a lead author of the study, told the Imperial College London News.
With a ton of added sugars and fats, it’s no surprise that these types of foods have been attributed to causing health concerns like cardiovascular, coronary heart and cerebrovascular diseases in the past, per a study published in the medical journal The BMJ in 2019.
In the new study, published in the journal eClinicalMedicine, a team from the Imperial College London used information from the UK Biobank, which followed 200,000 people — including daily diet logs and health diagnoses — for 10 years.
The participants’ diets included anywhere from 9.1% to 41.4% of processed foods in their diet, per the study. Researchers found that those who ate more processed foods developed cancer and died from cancer at a much higher rate than those who didn’t.
Specifically, ovarian cancer and breast cancer were found to be the most common forms of cancer, per the study.
“The findings add to previous studies showing an association between a greater proportion of ultraprocessed foods in the diet and a higher risk of obesity, heart attacks, stroke, and type 2 diabetes,” Simon Steenson, a nutrition scientist at the British Nutrition Foundation, not involved in the study, told CNN.
“However, an important limitation of these previous studies and the new analysis published today is that the findings are observational and so do not provide evidence of a clear causal link between (ultraprocessed foods) and cancer, or the risk of other diseases,” Steenson continued.
Even though this study didn’t prove that ultraprocessed foods cause cancer, lead senior author of the study, Eszter Vamos, told the Imperial College London News that it “adds to the growing evidence that ultraprocessed foods are likely to negatively impact our health including our risk for cancer.”
“Given the high levels of consumption in U.K. adults and children,” said Vamos, “this has important implications for future health outcomes.”