ULTRA-PROCESSED FOODS 'LINKED TO CANCER'

A LINK between highly processed foods and cancer has been suggested by French researchers.

They classified foods including cakes, chicken nuggets and mass-produced bread as "ultraprocessed".

A study of 105,000 people hinted the more of such foods people ate, the greater their risk of cancer.

A lot of caution is being expressed about the study, but experts said a healthy diet is best.

Diet is already known to affect the risk of cancer.

Being overweight is the biggest preventable cause of the disease after smoking and the World Health Organization says processed meat does slightly increase the risk of cancer.

But what about ultra-processed foods?

The team - at Universite Sorbonne Paris Cite - used food surveys on two days to work out what people were eating.

Those on the study, who were mostly middle-aged women, were followed for an average of five years.

The results, in the British Medical Journal, showed that if the proportion of ultra-processed food in the diet increased by 10%, then the number of cancers detected increased by 12%. The researchers concluded: “These results suggest that the rapidly increasing consumption of ultraprocessed foods may drive an increasing burden of cancer in the next decades.”

But they said the findings need to “be confirmed by other large-scale” studies and research was needed to establish what could be behind the link.

This study is far from the definitive take on ultra-processed foods and cancer.

It cannot say ultra-processed foods are a cause of cancer. Overall she said the study was a “warning signal to us to have a healthy diet” but people should not worry about eating a bit of processed food “here and there” as long as they were getting plenty of fruit, vegetables and fibre. Dr Ian Johnson, from the Quadram Institute in Norwich, said the study had “identified some rather weak associations”.

There are also factors that muddy the waters as people who ate a lot of ultra-processed foods had other behaviours that have been linked to cancer.

They were much more likely to smoke, were less active, consumed more calories overall and were more likely to be taking the oral contraceptive.