Does Processed Meat Cause Dementia?
At this point, you can easily ignore the headlines of recent studies that claim that certain foods are “bad” for you or, conversely, canonized as “superfoods.” Most research articles demonizing a particular type of food usually follow a pattern: identifying a particular condition that everyone fears, looking at pre-existing datasets presented by themselves (courtesy of a biobank or other long-term observational study), discovering a possible connection between the food in question, and disease, and concluding by noting that correlation does not always equal causation, and encouraging people to adopt healthier eating habits despite this.
Well, another of these studies has been published today and tackles the classic question of whether eating meat, especially highly processed meat, may increase your risk of dementia.
What this study found
The latest study on the connection between the hot dog and the brain came from the Nutrition Epidemiology Team of the University of Leeds in the UK and was published today in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition .
Using data collected in the period from 2006 to 2010 at almost 500 000 people aged 40 to 69 years, members of the UK Biobank , the researchers found out whether there is a potential link between meat consumption and the development of dementia.
Whilethis is not a new research question, the authors believe this is the first large-scale study of participants over time to examine the relationship between specific types and amounts of meat consumed and disease risk.
The researchers found that people who ate 25 grams of processed meat a day (equivalent to about one slice of thick bacon) had a 44% increased risk of developing dementia.
What you need to know about the results
Of course, like the results of such studies, they should be treated with suspicion. First, the results do not provide direct evidence that eating processed meat causes dementia — it’s just that there’s a pattern in the data. Moreover, it was an observational study using data from a biobank, not a controlled experiment.
Of the nearly half a million participants, 2,896 cases of dementia were diagnosed on average over eight years of follow-up, with men being diagnosed more often than women. Based on other data available through the biobank, the researchers also noted that people who developed dementia tended to be older, less financially affluent, less educated, smoked more often, were less physically active, were more likely to have a stroke and family history. a history of dementia. and are more likely to carry a gene closely associated with dementia.
Meanwhile, the researchers also noted that people who ate more processed meat also tended to be men, less educated, smokers, overweight or obese, ate fewer vegetables and fruits, and had higher protein and fat intakes (including saturated fat).
Conclusion
According to study lead researcher Huifeng Zhang, a graduate student at the School of Food Science and Nutrition, University of Leeds:
More evidence is needed, but the direction of the effect is related to current health dietary recommendations that lower consumption of unprocessed red meat may have health benefits.
In other words, more, more focused research is needed to claim that “processed meat causes dementia”. Until then, we should probably cut back on foods that we already know we should be getting in moderation.