Most of us know that potato chips, store-bought pastries, and sodas aren’t the foundation of a healthy diet. But how bad for us are these foods, really? A new review of research involving nearly 10 million participants offers some of the most compelling evidence yet that highly processed foods undermine our mental and physical health.
For the comprehensive review, published in the British medical journal BMJ, researchers pooled data from 14 studies, which encompassed 9,888,373 participants in all, to look at connections between ultra-processed foods (UPFs) and different health outcomes, including Type 2 diabetes, anxiety, cancer, and early death. For their definition of ultra-processed foods, the researchers referred to the NOVA system, which classifies foods according to their level of processing. They included only studies published within the last three years, and excluded any…