One in four heart disease deaths linked to common foods most of us eat everyday, new study finds
A quarter of deaths from heart disease are linked to foods so common they make up more than half the diet of the average Brit, according to new research.
This scourge making heart disease worse is something called UPFs, or 'ultra processed foods', and that includes such staples of the diet as ready meals, crisps, biscuits, processed meats, cereals and fizzy drinks.
Previous research has shown that UPFs are connected with harm to every organ in the body, so it's worrying that we're eating so much of it.
The dietary concern is even more pronounced in poorer areas, as people who are younger and from poorer parts of the country can have as many as 80 percent UPFs in their daily diet.
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Researchers at the Center for Public Health Research at Montreal University have released a study warning that between 23 percent and 38 percent of heart disease deaths could be attributed to eating too many UPFs.
They studied how the consumption of ultra processed foods in Canada had been a 'a substantial and potentially preventable' contributor to thousands of deaths from heart disease.
They said: "These findings reinforce the need for clinical and public health interventions aimed at reducing UPF intake as a key component of cardiovascular disease prevention.”
In their study they said that because UPFs were all over the place it would be difficult to make serious progress against the damage they cause without going above an individual level.
When so much of the food on offer is ultra processed it becomes hard to do a food shop and avoid it.
“While public education and individual counselling remain important components of health promotion, their impact is limited without broader environmental and policy support," the researchers explained.
"To drive meaningful change in dietary patterns, comprehensive structural measures are essential.
“These include regulations on food taxes, front-of-package labelling, marketing restrictions and reformulation targets aimed at improving food quality.”
Warnings over the damage being done by UPFs have been issued by a number of health experts as some doctors have called them 'worse than smoking' and a heart surgeon said that the 'longer the shelf life, the shorter your life'.
Not everyone is convinced by the latest study, as Professor Kevin McConway of the Open University called the study 'an interesting attempt at modelling potential health effects of UPF consumption in one country'.
However, he said he 'wouldn’t want to put much trust in the detailed estimates it presents', and was glad the researchers had said reducing the consumption of UPFs 'could' reduce the health hazards of heart disease rather than declaring it a certainty.
“I’m not trying to claim that reducing UPF consumption in Canada would have no effect on cardiovascular disease and death," the professor said in response to the study.
"It might well do so, but any reduction could be substantially smaller than the figures in this paper, or indeed larger. And the measure used in the research, deaths and disease attributable to one specific risk factor (UPF consumption here), can be awkward to interpret.
"It sounds as if it means ‘deaths caused by UPF consumption’, but it doesn’t mean that, particularly not for a disease like cardiovascular disease (CVD) that has many potential causes that can interact with one another."
Professor Tom Sanders of King's College London noted that the study's data was not from controlled trials, saying: "It is well established that observational studies can be confounded by association with other life-style factors."
He added that 'death from cardiovascular disease has fallen by about 80 percent over the past twenty years in Canada' and an improvement in diet was seen as one of the reasons behind it.
The experts did not dispute that ultra processed foods were bad, but wanted to make clear the researcher's link to a quarter of heart disease deaths would need further research.
Topics: Health, Science, Food And Drink, Lifestyle
Joe Harker