研究：吃方便麵會縮短你的壽命

一項研究指出，大學生和省錢達人愛吃的方便麵會導致心臟病和糖尿病。

研究發現，每週吃兩次或兩次以上方便麵會增加患心臟代謝綜合徵的風險，尤其是女性，而患上這一綜合症的人，患上嚴重的心血管疾病和中風的風險也會大大增加。

方便麵含有許多不健康的作料，而且還含有大量飽和脂肪酸。

該研究主要關注韓國人群，因為韓國人均吃的方便麵是全世界最多的。

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 withcardiometabolic 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 warningagainst 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 US in 1972), did not respond to a request for comment from Yahoo Health.

The bottom line? Ingest the cheap and filling noodles at your own risk.