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High intake of several emulsifiers (part of the "E numbers" group of food additives), widely used in industrially processed foods to improve texture and extend shelf-life, is associated with increased risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD), suggests a study. Given that these food additives are used ubiquitously in thousands of widely consumed ultra-processed food products, these findings have important public health implications, say the researchers. Emulsifiers are often added to processed and packaged foods such as pastries, cakes, ice cream, desserts, chocolate, bread, margarine and ready meals, to enhance their appearance, taste, texture and shelf life. They include celluloses, mono- and...

our cereal could be killing you. A new study out of England published Tuesday links ultra-processed foods with heightened risk for developing and dying from cancer. Researchers at London’s Imperial School of Public Health collected diet data for nearly 200,000 middle-aged adults and monitored their health over roughly 10 years, specifically their risk of developing 34 types of cancer. The medical researchers found that every 10 percentage point increase in the consumption of “ultra-processed” food — defined as items heavily processed during production such as ready-to-eat meals and a majority of breakfast cereals — was associated with a 2 percent...

The building of the world’s largest bioreactors to produce cultivated meat has been announced, with the potential to supply tens of thousands of shops and restaurants. Experts said the move could be a “gamechanger” for the nascent industry. The US company Good Meat said the bioreactors would grow more than 13,000 tonnes of chicken and beef a year. It will use cells taken from cell banks or eggs, so the meat will not require the slaughter of any livestock. There are about 170 companies around the world working on cultured meat, but Good Meat is the only company to have...

Four weeks on a diet of highly processed food led to a strong inflammatory response in the brains of aging rats that was accompanied by behavioral signs of memory loss, a new study has found. Researchers also found that supplementing the processed diet with the omega-3 fatty acid DHA prevented memory problems and reduced the inflammatory effects almost entirely in older rats. Neuroinflammation and cognitive problems were not detected in young adult rats that ate the processed diet. The study diet mimicked ready-to-eat human foods that are often packaged for long shelf lives, such as potato chips and other snacks,...

Impossible Foods has secured Child Nutrition Labels for its Impossible Burger products, which means they can now be part of school nutrition programs in the US. To obtain the CN Labels, USDA's Food and Nutrition Services had to evaluate the plant-based meat's product formulation, as well as the company's quality control procedures and manufacturing processes. Now that it has acquired CN Labels for its products, the company is launching K-12 pilot programs this month in partnership with several school districts. The Palo Alto Unified School District in California, the Aberdeen School District in Washington, the Deer Creek Public Schools in...

The quick and easy noshes you love are chipping away at your mortality one nibble at a time, according to new research from France: We face a 14% higher risk of early death with each 10% increase in the amount of ultraprocessed foods we eat. "Ultraprocessed foods are manufactured industrially from multiple ingredients that usually include additives used for technological and/or cosmetic purposes," wrote the authors of the study, published Monday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine. "Ultraprocessed foods are mostly consumed in the form of snacks, desserts, or ready-to-eat or -heat meals," and their consumption "has largely increased during...

If most foods created by the food industry are unhealthy, why not place a stiff tax on all of them and use the revenue to subsidize healthier food? This bold proposal, from Boston-area researchers, appears as commentary in the current issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). The researchers from Tufts University, Harvard University and Boston Children's Hospital wrote that their plan would surely meet strong opposition from both the food and restaurant industries but that it could help people make meaningful dietary changes and substantially reduce health care costs. At issue is the higher cost of...

Processed food NOT fat is the real cause of heart disease, claims heart surgeon who says a diet of natural food can even reverse the illness Dr. Dwight Lundell admits prescribing cholesterol-lowering medications, and a low-fat, high-simple carbohydrate diet for two-and-a-half decades was misguided 'These recommendations are no longer scientifically or morally defensible,' he writes in an essay that has ignited the Internet He vlaims these foods actively destroy the walls of our blood vessels by causing chronic inflammation, which in turn causes heart disease The cardiac surgeon recommends only eating foods your grandmother, or great-grandmother, would recognise An Arizona...

Phosphates in food are an all too common occurrence these days. Phosphates, usually labelled under the generic term sodium phosphate, are added to food for a variety of reasons. Phosphates in food are used as texturizers to change the look or feel of a food and to increase the shelf life of a food. Phosphates are also used as an emulsifier to mix two foods together that would otherwise not mix. For example, a food product with added oil may contain an emulsifier to stop the oil from separating from the main food. Phosphates in foods are sometimes used as...

There's a slow poison out there that's severely damaging our children and threatening to tear apart our culture. The ironic part is, it's a "health food," one of our most popular. Now, I'm a health-food guy, a fanatic who seldom allows anything into his kitchen unless it's organic. I state my bias here just so you'll know I'm not anti-health food. The dangerous food I'm speaking of is soy. Soybean products are feminizing, and they're all over the place. You can hardly escape them anymore. I have nothing against an occasional soy snack. Soy is nutritious and contains lots of...

Recent weeks have offered a rich harvest of new "health" threats with splashy headlines warning us about the supposed dangers from processed meats, hair dyes, and tanning parlors. While all of these stories are all a little odd, perhaps the oddest is the one about how meat increases the risk of stomach cancer. This story was featured on the networks and in several major papers. One news outlet even went so far as to tell its readers just how much bacon they could eat before being at risk for cancer! What makes the meat and stomach cancer story odd from...

MEXICO CITY -- Squeezed behind the wheel of his bright green Volkswagen Beetle, Ignacio Montealegre gazed down at his protruding belly and succumbed to a moment of nostalgia. "I used to be slim. But then I got married and had to work so hard, I stopped playing soccer and got fat," said the 230-pound taxi driver. "At the end of the day, I go home, eat quite a lot and go to sleep in front of the television." Montealegre is a man of his time and a lumbering testament to a major new health challenge facing his country. According to...