Healthy eating can still falter: ultraprocessed foods blunt attention even on good diets

A study from Australia and Brazil found that ultraprocessed foods can impair attention and cognitive processing speed after just one bag of chips, even in middle-aged adults whose overall diet contained about 41% ultraprocessed foods. The effect, observed in more than 2,100 participants, occurred within minutes and persisted despite otherwise healthy eating patterns like the Mediterranean diet. Researchers say additives and the degree of processing may drive this link, which aligns with prior work showing higher ultraprocessed intake associates with increased dementia risk factors (and a Harvard Medical School study suggesting a 25% higher dementia risk with higher ultraprocessed consumption). The findings highlight that not only nutrition but also ultra-processing itself may impact brain function.