Do finished products harm the intestines?
Christiane Fux studied journalism and psychology in Hamburg. The experienced medical editor has been writing magazine articles, news and factual texts on all conceivable health topics since 2001. In addition to her work for, Christiane Fux is also active in prose. Her first crime novel was published in 2012, and she also writes, designs and publishes her own crime plays.
More posts by Christiane Fux All content is checked by medical journalists.Inflammatory bowel diseases such as Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis are becoming increasingly common in industrialized countries. Experts suspect that changes in eating habits could play a central role in this.
An international team of researchers has evaluated detailed nutritional data from around 116,000 adults from 21 countries with low, middle and high incomes. The scientists focused primarily on the consumption of highly processed foods.
Fat, sweet, salty
These already make up a very high proportion of the supermarket supply. They include ready-made meals made from cans and plastic trays, but also frozen products such as pizza as well as packaged baked goods, sweetened breakfast cereals, sausage products and artificially sweetened drinks.
Such products contain large amounts of sugar, fat, salt and additives. But they lack vitamins and fiber.
The subjects aged 35 to 70 years participated in the study between 2003 and 2016. During this time 90 of them developed Crohn's disease and 377 developed ulcerative colitis.
The risk increases with consumption
For participants who ate one to four servings of highly processed foods per day, the risk of inflammatory bowel disease was 67 percent higher than for people who ate a maximum of one such serving per day.
Anyone who consumed five or more such products a day was 83 percent more likely to develop Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis. This was also true after the researchers had calculated out influencing factors such as age and region of residence.
However, while the connection between the consumption of highly processed foods and Crohn's disease could be clearly established, the data for ulcerative colitis were inconclusive.
In addition, since this is only an observational study, the results are no evidence that the highly processed foods actually promote ulcerative colitis or Crohn's disease. In addition, the data collected is based on the participants' reports and did not take into account whether their diets changed over the years.
Processing risk factor
Still, scientists suspect that it is not the foods themselves that pose the increased risk of inflammatory bowel disease, but rather the way in which they are processed. "The study supports the hypothesis that the consumption of extremely processed foods could be a factor that increases the risk of inflammatory bowel disease," the researchers write.
"Further study is needed to identify specific potential factors among processed foods that may be responsible for the associations observed in our study," they conclude.
Chronic inflammatory bowel disease is associated with frequent diarrhea, deficiency symptoms and other complaints. They can seriously affect the quality of life. Treatment options are limited and a cure is currently not possible.
