Preservatives Probably Aren't Giving Us All Heart Attacks
Why do we keep doing the same thing over and over again.
There’s nothing we love to hate more than a scary chemical in our food. Any study that finds some sort of harm for a food additive is immediately thrust into headlines worldwide. There’s just something wonderfully simple about modern food ingredients being bad for our health—intuitively, we all sort of assume that stuff we don’t recognize must be harmful, so we love to hear that it is.
The latest study to hit the headlines is no exception. Based on a paper from French researchers common food preservatives found in the majority of foods you can get in a modern supermarket may be causing heart disease. As Wired put it, “Food Preservatives May Increase the Risk of High Blood Pressure and Cardiovascular Disease”.
The “may” is, of course, doing a lot of work there, but it still sounds terrifying. Food preservatives are pretty essential to our modern lifestyles. They are a key part of the way in which we store and consume food, and if we had to get rid of them there are many foods that would probably disappear from supermarket shelves entirely.
Fortunately for the world, the research is less than convincing. There is a certainly a paper showing some associations between preservatives and disease, but the likelihood of there being anything to worry about is very low. In fact, this whole debacle is a repeat of an almost identical story from 6 months ago.
Let’s look at the data.
