Increasing your daily consumption of ultraprocessed foods by 10% — basically the equivalent of a small bag of potato chips — may raise your risk of dementia even if you normally eat a healthy plant-rich diet, according to a new study.
Ultraprocessed foods, or UPFs, make up about 53% of all calories consumed by adults in the United States, according to the latest data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Children in the United States obtain nearly 62% of their energy from UPFs, the CDC found.
“Our study showed that UPF consumption was associated with worse attention and higher dementia risk in middle-aged and older adults,” said lead author Barbara Cardoso, a senior lecturer of nutrition dietetics and food at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.
The study could only show an association, not a direct cause and effect. However, “this association was not changed by adherence to the Mediterranean diet, indicating that this is linked to food processing rather than simply food displacement,” Cardoso said in an email.
The research is an “important addition” to the growing evidence base showing the potential harms of ultraprocessed foods on the brain, said Dr. W. Taylor Kimberly, a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School in Boston, who was not involved in the study.
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