Eating this type of food can age you faster: study

So much for aging like fine wine.

Another study links ultra-processed foods (UPF) such as packaged foods, sugary drinks, mass-produced bread, fruit yogurt, some breakfast cereals and meat alternatives to accelerated biological aging.

Biological age – the age of our cells and tissues – is influenced by genetics and lifestyle habits such as diet and exercise.

Middle-aged and elderly Italian study participants who got more than 14% of their daily calories from UPF appeared to be biologically older than their chronological age, which is the number of years they have been alive.

UPFs have long earned a bad reputation for being loaded with calories, sugar, fat and salt.

“In addition to being nutritionally deficient, they are high in sugars, salt and saturated or trans fats, [UPFs] are subjected to intensive industrial processing that actually changes their food matrix, resulting in the loss of nutrients and fiber,” explained epidemiologist and study co-author Marialaura Bonaccio.

“This can have important consequences for a variety of physiological functions, including [sugar] metabolism and the composition and functionality of the gut microbiota,” added Bonaccio about the balance of bacteria, viruses and fungi in our digestive system. “Also, [UPFs] often wrapped in plastic packaging, thus becoming vehicles of toxic substances for the body.”

Bonaccio’s team instructed 22,500 study participants to fill out a nutritional questionnaire, and they measured 36 biomarkers in their blood to calculate their biological age.

The findings were published this week in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

The results follow a recent study by the University of California, San Francisco that found that added sugar accelerates biological aging, even if it is part of a healthy diet.

High amounts of sugar in the blood can damage cells, leading to chronic inflammation, which has been linked to obesity, heart disease, diabetes, liver disease and various types of cancer.

Recent studies have found that UPFs make up about 60% of the typical American’s daily caloric intake.