Cook more at home to reduce ultra-processed food intake, say cardiologist groups

Want to reduce your intake of ultra-processed food? If so, cook at home more often, don’t eat late at night and chew your food more slowly. Those are among some of the tips doctors have offered to help people limit the amount of UPF they consume given the acute and growing danger it poses to human health worldwide. Their recommendations also include eating plain rather than flavoured or sweetened yoghurt, replacing sugary drinks with water and reading the nutrition label and list of ingredients on any tin, packet or sachet of food before buying anything. Those are some of the things specialist heart doctors are being urged to advise patients to do if they already have heart disease or are at risk of developing it. An estimated 8 million people in the UK are estimated to have been diagnosed with cardiovascular disease, which claims about 170,000 lives annually and is one of the country’s biggest killers. That means they are at risk of having, or have already suffered, a heart attack or stroke or have a condition such as atrial fibrillation. The advice is outlined in a new “clinical consensus statement” on how to tackle UPF drawn up by the European Society of Cardiology and European Association of Preventive Cardiology. They have set out steps they think cardiologists should take when talking to patients about their health. …