Food and Attention

A new study published in April of 2026 suggests that an increase in the consumption of highly processed foods can lead to difficulty focusing and an increased risk of developing dementia.

Ultra-processed foods (UPFs) have been under a microscope recently, as a growing body of research has hinted that this category of foods can lead to overeating, weight-gain, and a higher risk of developing heart disease and diabetes.

As the label implies, UPFs are foods that have been heavily processed and include with one or more ingredients that wouldn’t typically be found in a home kitchen, including emulsifiers like hydrogenated oils, artificial colors and flavors, and sweeteners like high fructose corn syrup. These ingredients are common in food products found on shelves, and the incentives of the consumer food market—needing to make things shelf-stable, appealing, and ideally addictive (so customers keep coming back)—are why these ingredients are so common in consumer food products these days.

While these ingredients are found in foods globally, they’re more common in some places than others. More than half the calories the average American adult consumes are from ultra-processed foods, for instance. So this isn’t a niche category, this is the dominant food dynamic in some places. And that’s part of why UPFs have been such a big focus for researchers, of late. It seems like their prominence and the slew of health issues people in places like the US face might be correlated.

That correlation is still not definitive, but we are seeing more and more data backing it, and we’re learning more about what these foods seem to do to us, beyond our body composition and overall health.

That new study shows that subjects who got about 41% of their daily energy from UPFs (which is close to the national average for adults in Australia, which is 42%) saw a measurable drop in their ability to focus.

What’s more, they saw a measurable drop for every 10% increase in their consumption of ultra-processed foods. So the more chips and soda and ready-made meals they ate, the less they were capable of focusing. And interestingly, this held up even for people who consumed a generally healthy diet: if they deviated from their healthy diet to snack, their ability to focus still suffered at about this rate.

Eating more UPFs was also linked to an increase in dementia risk factors in this study, including high blood pressure and obesity, which reinforces the findings of other studies.

The focus-related findings are the more surprising data points, though, as UPFs have been linked to all sorts of health issues (including dementia) in previous research, but the link between unhealthy foods and focus is (so far, at least) less well-tread territory.