If you look at it, Names such as “potassium sorbate,” “citric acid,” and “L-ascorbic acid (vitamin C)” are often seen on the ingredient labels of foods on supermarket shelves. These are food additives intended to prevent spoilage and maintain quality, and are widely included in industrially produced processed foods. According to Open Food Facts, the world’s largest open food database, more than 20% of processed foods and beverages in the database contain at least one preservative.
Against this backdrop, a research team led by scientists from Sorbonne Paris North University and Paris Cité University analyzed data from the large NutriNet Santé Cohort Study, which followed 112,395 participants for a median of 7.9 years, to investigate the relationship between dietary preservative intake and the risk of developing hypertension and cardiovascular disease.
“Experimental studies suggest that some preservative food additives may be harmful to cardiovascular health, but there is insufficient evidence of the effects of these ingredients on humans,” Anais Hasenboehler, a postdoctoral researcher who led the study, said in a press release. “To our knowledge, this is the first study of its kind to investigate the association between different preservatives and cardiovascular health.”
8 preservatives linked to high blood pressure risk
Researchers have classified preservatives into two broad categories. The first consists of non-antioxidant preservatives such as sorbates, nitrites, and sulfites that inhibit mold and bacterial growth. The second consists of antioxidant preservatives such as ascorbic acid, citric acid, and erythorbate, which prevent food oxidation and discoloration. Almost all participants (99.5 percent) ingested at least one preservative during the first two years of the study, the researchers said.
The analysis found that participants who ate the highest amounts of non-antioxidant preservatives had a 29 percent higher risk of developing high blood pressure than those who ate the least. They also had a 16% higher risk of overall cardiovascular disease, including heart attack, stroke, and angina pectoris. Similarly, participants with the highest intake of antioxidant preservatives showed a 22% higher risk of hypertension.
The researchers also looked at the 17 most commonly consumed preservatives individually. Eight of these were associated with an increased risk of hypertension: potassium sorbate (E202), potassium metabisulfite (E224), sodium nitrite (E250), ascorbic acid (E300), sodium ascorbate (E301), sodium erythorbate (E316), citric acid (E330), and rosemary extract (E392). Among these, ascorbic acid was also associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease.
During the follow-up period, researchers recorded 5,544 cases of hypertension and 2,450 cases of cardiovascular disease, including 1,142 cerebrovascular events and 1,308 cases of coronary artery disease. The study also found that approximately 16% of the association between non-antioxidant preservatives and cardiovascular disease was mediated indirectly through hypertension. In other words, the findings suggest that preservatives may contribute to high blood pressure and, in turn, increase the risk of cardiovascular disease.
Voices calling for a review of food additive regulations
The researchers stress that these findings come from observational studies and do not establish a causal relationship between food preservatives and high blood pressure or cardiovascular disease. This study also has important limitations. Women made up 78.7 percent of participants, meaning that this cohort includes a relatively high proportion of highly educated people and is not completely representative of the general population.
Nevertheless, the statistical model accounted for a wide range of potential confounders, and the results remained consistent across multiple sensitivity analyses.
“These results suggest that the risks and benefits of these food additives need to be re-evaluated by responsible authorities such as EFSA in Europe and FDA in the United States to strengthen consumer protection,” Mathilde Touvier, research director at France’s National Institute for Health and Medical Care, said in a press release. “In the meantime, these findings support existing recommendations to favor unprocessed and minimally processed foods and avoid unnecessary additives.”
The potential for preservatives long considered safe to impact cardiovascular health raises important questions about current regulatory approaches. For additives that are continuously ingested through multiple foods without numerical limits on their use, our findings suggest that it may be time to restart the debate about whether existing regulations are appropriate.
This story was originally wired japan Translated from Japanese.
