Instant Noodles Cause Heart Attack, Say Researchers

Are you a habitual eater of instant noodles? Then be ready for the consequences as experts have linked it to challenges with the human metabolic process thus resulting in heart diseases and stroke in the long run.

Ordinarily, noodles, a staple food is seen as cheap, easy to prepare and best eaten by school children and workers who have little time to eat major foods.

Fox News says a new research has found that the instant noodles commonly known as ramen may increase people’s risk of metabolic changes linked to heart disease and stroke.

In the study, according to Fox News, “women in South Korea who consumed more of the pre-cooked blocks of dried noodles were more likely to have metabolic syndrome regardless of what else they ate, or how much they exercised.”

The research study published in the Journal of Nutrition emphasised that people who had metabolic syndrome could have high blood pressure or high blood sugar levels, with the consequence being the risk of heart disease, stroke and diabetes.

Co-author of the study, Hyun Shin, a doctoral candidate at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, said although instant noodle is a convenient and delicious food, there could be an increased risk for metabolic syndrome given the high sodium, unhealthy saturated fat and glycemic loads in the food.

To arrive at this conclusion, Shin and his team at Baylor University and Harvard studied and investigated the health and diet of at least 11,000 adults in South Korea between ages 19 to 64 looking at how many times they ate instant noodles every week.

The researchers found that women who ate instant noodles twice or more every week had a higher risk of developing metabolic syndrome than those who ate less.

However, the researchers said they could not link any association between eating noodles such number of times and developing metabolic syndrome in men, arguing that this may be linked to the difference in gender of men and women including the effect of sex hormones and metabolism.

The researchers said they picked population in South Korea because the country is the highest consumer of noodles in the world with a consumption rate of 3.4 billion packages of instant noodles in 2010.

Lisa Young, a Professor and nutritionist at the New York University, while speaking about the study, said it could apply to every part of the world where noodles (ramen) are sold and eaten

“Instant noodles are high in fat, high in salt, high in calories and they’re processed; all those factors could contribute to some of the health problems addressed.

“That doesn’t mean that every single person is going to respond the same way, but the piece to keep in mind is that it’s not a healthy product, and it is a processed food,” Fox News quoted Young as saying, adding that processed foods are known to contain high amounts of sugar and salt since they are designed to have long shelf lives.

Young added that to eat instant noodles and avoid the dangers in it, “number one, don’t eat it every day; number two, portion control (in which one should eat small amount of instant noodles and mix them with vegetables and other healthier, non-processed foods).”