Adults in the highest quarter for ultra-processed food intake had 40% higher odds of vascular brain injury on MRI than those in the lowest quarter, in a cross-sectional study of 8,783 Canadian adults published in JAMA Network Open on 15 October 2026. The analysis, led by Russell J. de Souza at McMaster University's Population Health Research Institute, pooled participants aged 35 to 69 with no history of cardiovascular disease from the Canadian Alliance for Healthy Hearts and Healthy Minds and the PURE-MIND study. Intake was measured by validated food frequency questionnaire and expressed as servings per 2,000 kcal a day. The adjusted odds ratio for vascular brain injury, defined as covert brain infarcts or a high burden of white matter hyperintensities, was 1.40 (95% CI 1.10 to 1.77), with a P value for trend of .009. The top quartile also carried 1.7 percentage points more body fat.
The cognitive result was null
The same analysis found no significant association between ultra-processed food intake and either cognitive measure it used, the Montreal Cognitive Assessment or the Digit Symbol Substitution Test. Visceral fat volume was 5.7 mL higher in the top quartile (95% CI 3.2 to 8.3), while hepatic fat fraction did not differ significantly. The authors report that the brain injury association was sensitive to how ultra-processed food exposure was defined, and that longitudinal studies are needed to establish temporality. Diet and imaging were captured at the same visit, so the design cannot show which came first, and the cohorts are Canadian rather than British. Participants took a mean 42.2% of daily calories from ultra-processed food (SD 14.2%), ranging from a median 3.1 servings per 2,000 kcal in the lowest quartile to 12.8 in the highest. Mean age was 57.7 years and 56.6% of the sample was female. The two cohorts were funded by public and charitable bodies including the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Heart and Stroke Foundation and the Canadian Partnership Against Cancer, with the PURE study also receiving unrestricted pharmaceutical grants. The authors state the funders had no role in the design or conduct of the study.
What this means in practice
The exposure here is the overall pattern of what people eat, measured in servings per 2,000 kcal and as a share of daily calories, not any single nutrient, brand or product. The authors stop short of a causal claim and the paper tests no supplement of any kind. What the paper supports is narrower than the headlines it produced. It found a correlation with two imaging markers in middle-aged Canadians, no measured effect on thinking or memory, and no evidence yet on direction. Newsweek's write-up also reported a larger association among women, which is a subgroup result and does not appear in the paper's own abstract, so it carries less weight than the headline figure.
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