Not too long ago, I wrote about an op-ed in the New York Times by a Georgetown professor arguing that “junk food” (a term he used for the ultra-processed slop that is TikTok and the like) is eroding our attention spans. Now, just a couple of weeks later, researchers publishing in Alzheimer’s & Dementia: Diagnosis, Assessment & Disease Monitoring have found that actual junk food is doing the same.
The study followed 2,192 Australian adults and found a small but noticeable link between ultra-processed food consumption and declining attention. For every 10 percent bump in calories coming from things like frozen meals, soda, and packaged snacks, attention scores dipped slightly, while a separate score estimating dementia risk ticked up.
Again, not a massive difference that’s signaling that your brain functions are falling off a cliff every time you bite into a Twinkie, but it is a definite difference from, say, much healthier diets like the Mediterranean diet, which is renowned for its statistically noticeable health benefits even though researchers in this study found the negative effects of ultra-processed junk food so powerful that even participants who were strictly following Mediterranean-style diets were impacted.
The Amount of Junk You Eat Doesn’t Matter (Unless It’s None)
All told, the results of this study suggest that no matter how healthy you are in every other aspect of your life, even just a little bit of junk food can dampen those effects. The study tried to control for that by factoring in overall diet quality, and the results were the same. All this means that you may not be able to balance out your diet, no matter how hard you try, at least when it comes to the negative impacts of eating ultra-processed foods.
Of course, this research does not prove causation. It’s just a small snapshot of a pattern that other research teams down the line will independently build upon or discredit. But it does fit with the broader problems with how ultra-processed foods are stripped of nutrients and packed with additives and preservatives, and all in an effort to feed a maximum amount of people a dense caloric meal, which often takes the form of something that isn’t even a meal but rather a tiny individual snack with calories comparable to a full meal.
One interesting note is that memory wasn’t affected, only attention. That, of course it matters quite a bit since if you can’t pay attention to something to begin with, you won’t remember in the long run. Again, there’s a lot more research to be done on ultra-processed foods before anything definitive can be stated, but so far it’s looking like the same foods that are making you weak and flabby are also making you inattentive.
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