At this point, it may be easy to ignore the headlines in the most recent studies, claiming that a particular food is “bad” for you – or, on the contrary, it was canonized as a “superfood”. Most research articles that demonize a certain type of food usually follow a pattern: identifying a specific condition that everyone is afraid of, looking atexisting sets of self-reported data (courtesy of a biobank or other long-term observational study), noting a possible link between the food in question and the disease and concluding by pointing out that the correlation is not always the same as the cause, and encouraging people for adopt healthier eating habits regardless.
We will, another one of those studies was published today, and addresses the classic issue of eating meat – especially those meats that are highly processed – can increase our risk of dementia.
What this study found
The latest research on the hot dog-brain connection comes to us from Leeds University Nutritional Epidemiology Group in the UK, and was published today in American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
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Using data collected between 2006 and 2010 from almost 500,000 people aged 40 to 69 who are part of the UK Biobank, the researchers looked at whether there was a potential link between meat consumption and the development of dementia.
While this is not a new research question, the authors believe this is the first large-scale study of participants over time to examine a link between specific types and quantities of meat consumed, and the risk of developing the disease.
The researchers found that people who ate 25g of processed meat per day (roughly equivalent to a slice of bacon) had a 44% higher risk of developing dementia.
What to know about the discoveries
Of course, like the results of similar studies, they must be considered with caution. First, the findings do not provide direct evidence that eating processed meat causes dementia – only that a specific pattern has emerged in the data. Besides that, that wasis an observational study using self-reported data from a biobank – not a controlled experiment.
Of the nearly half a million participants, 2,896 cases of dementia were diagnosed over an average of eight years of observation – with more men being diagnosed than women. Based on other available data through the biobank, the researchers also noted that people who developed dementia were generally older, less financially secure, less educated, more likely to smoke, less physically active, more likely to have a history of stroke and family dementia, and more likely to carry a gene highly associated with dementia.
Meanwhile, the researchers also noted that people who ate more processed meat also tended to be male, less educated, smokers, overweight or obese, ate less vegetables and fruits and had a higher intake of protein and fat (including saturated fat).
The takeaway
Per lead researcher for the study, Huifeng Zhang, a doctoral student at the School of Food Science and Nutrition at the University of Leeds:
Additional confirmation is needed, but the direction of the effect is linked to current healthy eating guidelines, suggesting that lower consumption of unprocessed red meat may be beneficial to health.
In other words, to make a claim like “processed meats cause dementia,” additional, more targeted research needs to be done. And in the meantime, we should probably reduce the intake of food that we already knowwe should be enjoying With moderation.