What is an ultraprocessed food and does it increase your risk for cancer? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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Ultraprocessed foods are getting a lot of attention these days as dietary don’ts. Now a new study looks at their role in cardiovascular disease and cancer. William Nelson, director of the Kimmel Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins, says this study grouped all foods into four categories, and to avoid the ultraprocessed ones you have to know what they are. 

Nelson: Group 4 are the ultraprocessed foods in which you create this formulation of ingredients, basically in this category is pretty much everything you see in the grocery store. Soft drinks, snacks, candies, cookies, margarine, cereal, yoghurt, energy drinks, pizza, pasta, chocolate, sausages, soup, hot dogs, dessert, baby formula. If you look at the worst quartile of the nutritional score so the poorest nutrition, and the worst, the ultraprocessed foods what they found was that ultraprocessed food was about 10 to 11 percent of the diet of this whole group by weight.  :32

More ultraprocessed food consumption was associated with more adverse health outcomes. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.