Ultra-processed foods may make you age faster

NEW DELHI: Love to binge on ultra-processed food (UPFs) like chips, biscuits, sausages, burgers, soft drinks, and instant noodles? Beware, these can make you age faster biologically, warned a study.

A person's biological age is a relatively new way of measuring a person's health. It refers to how old a person seems based on various molecular biomarkers.

A person with a healthy lifestyle may have a biological age younger than their chronological age, while poor lifestyle choices, such as a diet high in UPFs, can accelerate biological ageing, said researchers from Monash University in Australia

The study, published in the journal Age and Aging, involved 16,055 participants from the US aged 20-79 and showed that for every 10 per cent increase in UPF consumption, the gap between biological and chronological age widened by approximately 2.4 months.

Participants in the highest UPF consumption quintile (68-100 per cent of energy intake in their diet) were biologically 0.86 years older than those in the lowest quintile (39 per cent 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 show that for every 10 per cent increase in total energy intake from ultra-processed food consumption there is a nearly 2 per cent increased risk of mortality and 0.5 per cent risk of chronic disease over two years," she added.

UPFs are industrial formulations typically containing ingredients not commonly used in home cooking, such as hydrogenated oils, high-fructose corn syrup, flavour enhancers, and emulsifiers.

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