Parkinson’s disease prevention may ‘begin at the dinner table’

Eating about a dozen servings of ultraprocessed food each day could more than double your risk of developing Parkinson's disease, according to a new study.

A single serving in the study was 8 ounces of diet or sugar-sweetened soda, a single hot dog, one slice of packaged cake, a mere tablespoon of ketchup or 1 ounce of potato chips — a typical small bag of chips is 1.5 ounces.

"Our research shows that eating too much processed food, like sugary sodas and packaged snacks, might be speeding up early signs of Parkinson's disease," said senior study author Dr. Xiang Gao, a distinguished professor and dean of the Institute of Nutrition at Fudan University in Shanghai, China, in a statement.

This latest study is part of the "growing evidence that diet might influence the development of Parkinson's disease," Gao said.

While the study found that people who ate more ultraprocessed foods tended to report more early symptoms, it did not find a direct increase in the risk of Parkinson's disease itself, said Dr. Daniel van Wamelen, a clinical senior lecturer in neuroscience at King's College London. He was not involved in the new research.

"The study did not track whether participants were diagnosed with Parkinson's later on," van Wamelen said in a statement. "That said, having more of these symptoms suggests a higher risk over time."

Brain health begins 'at the dinner table'

The study analyzed years of health and diet data on nearly 43,000 participants of the Nurses' Health Study and Health Professionals Follow-Up Study, two studies in the United States that have been gathering information on health behaviors for decades. The average age of people in the study was 48, and none had Parkinson's disease at the beginning of the study. All self-reported what they ate every few years — a limitation of the new research as participants may not have remembered their food intake accurately.

From : CNN