It’s not just wannabe mums that need to lay off the UPFs.
Your Back Page scrawler was lucky enough to grow up in a household environment where ultra-processed food was an occasional treat rather than a staple.
Breakfast was porridge and toast, lunch was homemade sandwiches and dinner was meat and three veg, the latter of which was seasonal and predominantly sourced from the backyard garden.
While our ungrateful childhood selves may well have preferred a diet of crisps, biscuits and fizzy drinks, we are in retrospect thankful that such a diet was beyond our means.
Particularly as the evidence of the harms caused by eating ultra-processed foodstuffs (UPFs) continues to escalate.
The latest research to cross our desk is a Dutch study which links the over-consumption of these tasty nasties to not only reduced fertility in men but also slower growth in early-stage embryos for women.
Publishing this week in the journal Human Reproduction, boffins from Erasmus University Medical Centre in Rotterdam said the study was the first to find that UPF consumption was not only important for the health of the mother, but might also be related to development of the offspring.
The researchers analysed findings from 831 women and 651 male partners enrolled in a prospective study that has been following parents from before conception onwards and into their offspring’s childhood for a four-year period from 2017 to 2021.
The researchers assessed the parents’ diet with a questionnaire during early pregnancy around 12 weeks, with different foods classified as either non-UPFs or UPFs, with UPF intake expressed as a percentage of total food intake in grams per day.
The average (median) UPF consumption was 22% and 25%, respectively, of women’s and men’s total food intake.
What they found was that for women, higher consumption of ultra-processed food was linked with slightly smaller embryonic growth at seven weeks, and smaller yolk sacs.
In men, the study found that higher ultra-processed food consumption was linked to “subfertility” and a longer time to get pregnant.
“We observed that UPFs consumption … was associated with slightly smaller embryonic growth and yolk sac size by the seventh week of pregnancy,” study lead author Dr Romy Gaillard told media.
“These differences in early human development were small, but are important from a research perspective and at population level, as we showed for the first time that UPF consumption is not only important for health of the mother, but may also be related to development of the offspring.”
The finding of subfertility for men was possibly due to the sensitivity of sperm to dietary composition, whereas maternal UPF consumption might directly influence the environment in the womb, Dr Gaillard said.
To be fair, the authors were quick to point out that the observational study showed correlation only and not causation and that further study was needed to determine any potential biological mechanisms for these effects.
But they added that findings suggested more attention needed to be paid to the health and lifestyle behaviours of males as well as females if they were hoping to become parents.
“Our results highlight the need to pay more attention to male health in the preconception period, which has traditionally been overlooked,” they said.
Send non-GMO, additive-free story tips to Holly@medicalrepublic.com.au.
