Holy hotplates! Instant ramen noodles, beloved cheap dinner of college kids and budget
eaters everywhere, have been linked to heart attacks and diabetes. A
study published in the Journal of Nutrition found that the ramen, along with
other instant noodle products, may
increase a person’s risk for cardiometabolic syndrome — a risk factor
for severe cardiovascular disease and stroke — especially in women.
“This
research is significant since many people are consuming instant noodles
without knowing possible health risks,” said lead researcher Hyun Joon
Shin, MD, in a
press release.
Shin, a clinical cardiology fellow at Baylor University Medical Center
and a nutrition epidemiology doctoral student at the Harvard School of
Public Health, could not be reached for further comment.
For the study, researchers looked at the data of 10,711 adults
between the ages of 19 and 64, collected via the nationally
representative
Korean National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey of 2007-2009.
They found that eating instant noodles — ramen, lo mein, glass, Thai, or
other — twice or more a week was associated with
cardiometabolic syndrome, a collection of abnormalities affecting the body’s cardiovascular, renal, and metabolic systems.
Although the specific cause of the problem was not immediately
clear, Shin noted that it might stem from the fact that most instant
noodle meals come packaged in Styrofoam, which contains bisphenol A
(BPA), a known hormone disruptor — which is also why women could have
been more affected in this study. But the food product contains plenty
of unhealthy ingredients, including MSG and the chemical
preservative tertiary-butylhydroquinone (TBHQ), and is also high in
saturated fat.
The study focused on individuals in South
Korea, Shin said, as the country has the highest per-capita number of
instant noodle consumers in the world, and because, in recent years,
health problems there, including heart disease and obesity, have been on
the rise. But the findings appear to be quite relevant to consumers
stateside too, as the United States ranked sixth globally in instant
noodle sales, according to the
World Instant Noodles Association,
which found that the United States accounted for 4,300 billion units
sold in 2013 (coming in just behind China, Indonesia, Japan, Vietnam,
and India — and one spot above South
Korea, in fact).
This is not the first time ramen noodles have been publicly maligned. In 2012, a viral
video taken from inside the digestive tract, part of a small and inconclusive
study by Dr. Braden Kuo, showed just what happened after instant ramen was
ingested — and it wasn’t pretty. The stomach worked overtime, struggling
for hours to grind up the strands; TBHQ, a petroleum byproduct, was
named as a possible culprit. Years earlier, Malaysian health
officials
issued a warning against eating instant noodles because of ingredients such as
thickeners, stabilizers, sodium, and preservatives that have been linked
to heart disease, stroke, and kidney damage.
Nissin Foods, maker of the first instant ramen noodle in Japan in
1958 (and the company that brought Top Ramen to the U.S. in 1972), did
not respond to a request for comment from Yahoo Health.
