The production and consumption of ultra-processed foods has increased exponentially in recent decades. Eating these foods excessively leads to a sometimes high consumption of sugars, salt and saturated fats. In addition, these are products that have been subjected to multiple industrial processes to which food ingredients such as sweeteners, thickeners, colorings or taste enhancers are normally added.
Different scientific studies have observed that ultra-processed foods could modify the intestinal microbiota and explain, in part, some of these adverse effects on human health that have been observed in prospective studies on large population groups.
Now, a research group from the Human Nutrition Unit of the Rovira i Virgili University (URV) in Tarragona has determined that the consumption of this type of food is associated with a greater presence of specific bacteria in the human intestine related to inflammatory gastrointestinal diseases.
The study was carried out on 641 elderly people with high cardiovascular risk who lived in different towns: Reus, Barcelona, Valencia and Malaga, in Spain. They were classified into three categories according to their consumption (low, medium or high) of ultra-processed foods. From the analysis of the fecal samples obtained from these patients, information on the composition of their intestinal microbiota was obtained by applying high-performance computational methods.
The research team observed that people who belonged to the group of high consumption of ultra-processed foods showed a greater amount of bacteria related to gastrointestinal diseases. This data -they point out- suggests that diet and nutritional status are determining factors in human health through changes in the composition of the intestinal microbiota. The detection of unhealthy dietary patterns related to the profiles of the intestinal microbiota would be essential to understand the mechanisms of various diseases and for the design of future strategies for prevention and improvement in public health.
M. Ángeles Martínez, Alessandro Atzeni and Jordi Salas-Salvadó, from the research team. (Photo: URV)
Postdoctoral researchers Alessandro Atzeni and María Ángeles Martínez participated in the study, supervised by Jordi Salas-Salvadó, head of the Human Nutrition Unit of the Department of Biochemistry and Biotechnology of the URV. A research team from the Pere Virgili Health Research Institute (IISPV) and the Network Biomedical Research Center for Pathophysiology of Obesity and Nutrition (CIBEROBN) in Spain have also collaborated.
The results of this study, a pioneer in this field, have been published in the scientific journal Frontiers in Nutrition. (Source: URV)