Like to eat ultra-processed foods? Here’s how it can age your body

Do you like to eat ultra-processed foods (UPF) like chips, biscuits, sausages, burgers, soft drinks and instant noodles? Be careful, these can make you biologically age faster, a study warns. A person’s biological age is a relatively new way of measuring a person’s health. It reflects how old a person appears to be based on various molecular biomarkers.

Researchers at Monash University in Australia said that a person’s biological age with a healthy lifestyle may be younger than their chronological age, while poor lifestyle choices, such as a diet high in UPF, may accelerate biological aging.

The study, published in the journal Age & Aging, included 16,055 US participants aged 20-79 and revealed that for every 10 percent increase in UPF consumption, the difference between biological and chronological age increased by approximately 2.4 months. .

Participants in the highest UPF consumption quintile (68–100 percent of energy intake in their diet) were 0.86 years older biologically than participants in the lowest quintile (39 percent or less of energy intake in their diet).

Nutritional biochemist Dr Barbara Cardoso, a senior lecturer in the university’s Department of Nutrition, Dietetics and Food, said the findings underlined the importance of eating as many unprocessed and minimally processed foods as possible.

“The significance of our findings is tremendous, as our predictions suggest that ultra-processed food consumption increases the risk of mortality by approximately 2 percent and chronic disease risk by 0.5 percent for every 10 percent increase in total energy intake. Two years,” he added.

UPFs are industrial formulations that contain ingredients not commonly used in home cooking, such as hydrogenated oils, high fructose corn syrup, flavor enhancers, and emulsifiers.

These foods are high in salt, sugar, fat and other unhealthy ingredients and are designed for convenience and long shelf life.

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