A study of 8,783 middle-aged adults has found that those who consume the most ultra-processed food tend to carry more body fat and visceral fat and are more likely to show signs of silent damage to the brain's blood vessels on MRI scans, according to 데일리메디.
The research, led by a team at McMaster University's Population Health Research Institute in Canada, was published on October 16 in JAMA Network Open, the 데일리메디 report said. It examined the eating habits, body composition, brain imaging, and cognitive test results of adults aged 35 to 69 who had no cardiovascular disease.
The findings add to a growing body of evidence that diet during the decades from a person's 30s through their 60s may shape brain health later in life, the report said.
Why it matters
Ultra-processed foods — items such as packaged snacks, sweetened cereals, soft drinks, instant noodles, and frozen ready meals — are often high in sodium, added sugar, and saturated fat while containing relatively little fiber, vitamins, or minerals, according to 데일리메디.
The study's corresponding author, Professor Sonia Anand, said the results suggest that the link between diet and brain health can be detected before a person notices any clear problems with memory or thinking, the report said. She described the work as part of mounting evidence that what people eat between their 30s and 60s affects their brain health afterward.
The research team noted that ultra-processed food already makes up a growing share of Canadians' diets and has been repeatedly tied to obesity and cardiometabolic disease, but its relationship to symptom-free vascular brain injury and cognition in midlife had remained unclear, 데일리메디 reported.
What the researchers measured
The analysis drew on participants from two studies: the Canadian Alliance for Healthy Hearts and Minds (CAHHM) and the Prospective Urban Rural Epidemiology-Mind (PURE-MIND) study, according to the report. All participants completed detailed dietary questionnaires and underwent brain MRI scans.
Researchers divided participants by how much ultra-processed food they ate. In the group with the highest intake, ultra-processed items made up 45 percent of the total food servings consumed each day, compared with 16.5 percent in the lowest-intake group, 데일리메디 reported.
The pattern was reversed for minimally processed foods such as fruits, vegetables, and grains. Those foods accounted for 68.6 percent of daily servings in the lowest ultra-processed food group but only 41.5 percent in the highest group, according to the report.
When the team compared the two extremes, the high-intake group had a body fat percentage 1.7 points higher than the low-intake group and an average visceral fat volume 5.7 milliliters larger, the report said. The researchers found no meaningful difference between the groups in the proportion of liver fat.
The most striking result concerned the brain. The team defined vascular brain injury as the presence of at least one of two findings: silent brain infarction or extensive white matter hyperintensities. The group eating the most ultra-processed food was 40 percent more likely than the lowest-intake group to show one or more of these signs, according to 데일리메디.
White matter hyperintensities are areas where MRI signals appear unusually bright in the brain's white matter, the report explained. They can reflect changes tied to cerebrovascular disease, and such damage may appear well before any decline in thinking becomes clinically apparent.
No clear link to cognitive scores
Despite the imaging findings, the study did not find a significant association between ultra-processed food intake and performance on cognitive tests, 데일리메디 reported.
Participants were assessed with the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), which evaluates memory, attention, and language ability, and with the Digit Symbol Substitution Test (DSST), which measures attention, working memory, and psychomotor speed. Neither measure showed a meaningful relationship with how much ultra-processed food participants ate.
The researchers cautioned that the study was cross-sectional, comparing eating habits and health status at a single point in time, so it cannot establish whether ultra-processed food directly caused the vascular brain changes, according to the report. They said long-term follow-up studies are needed to determine whether these changes go on to predict cognitive decline.
Anand noted that ultra-processed foods are often convenient and inexpensive choices, 데일리메디 reported. She said the study points to the possibility that a diet heavy in these foods is associated with brain changes that could lead to memory problems and stroke as people age.
The paper is titled "Ultraprocessed Food Intake and Adiposity, Vascular Brain Injury, and Cognition in Middle-Aged Adults," with Russell J. de Souza among the authors, and was published in JAMA Network Open.
What to watch: whether longer-term studies can show that the silent vascular changes seen on MRI in heavy ultra-processed food consumers actually precede measurable declines in memory and thinking, and whether cutting back on these foods reduces that risk.
