Everyday Food Preservatives Tied to Surging Blood Pressure Risk in Landmark Study

What's Hiding in Your Packaged Food

Check the ingredient label on a loaf of bread, a jar of pasta sauce, or a bag of deli meat, and you'll almost certainly find one of them. Food preservatives are so embedded in the modern diet that avoiding them is, for most people, practically impossible. Now, a sweeping new study suggests that ubiquity may come with a serious cardiovascular cost.

Research published in the European Heart Journal has found that common food preservatives across the processed food supply may be associated with a greater risk of high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease. Almost no one avoids these additives — in the study, 99.5% of participants consumed at least one of them during their first two years of tracking. That near-total exposure is precisely what makes the findings so significant.

A Study Built on Remarkable Detail

The work was conducted as part of NutriNet-Santé, a large ongoing research project examining the connections between nutrition and health, and included 112,395 volunteers living across France. Every six months, participants recorded everything they ate and drank during a three-day period, giving researchers unusually detailed information about their diets rather than relying only on broad estimates of food consumption. Participants were followed for an average of seven to eight years so researchers could track whether they developed high blood pressure or cardiovascular diseases such as heart attack, stroke, or angina.

The study was led by Dr. Mathilde Touvier, a research director at INSERM (the French National Institute for Health and Medical Research), and Anaïs Hasenböhler, PhD student, both from the Nutritional Epidemiology Research Team at the Université Sorbonne Paris Nord and Université Paris Cité, France. According to the researchers, "this is the first study of its kind to investigate the links between a wide range of preservatives and cardiovascular health."

The Eight Preservatives Under the Microscope

People who ate the largest amounts of non-antioxidant preservatives had a 29% higher risk of hypertension compared to those who ate the least, and a 16% higher risk of cardiovascular disease, including heart attack, stroke, and angina. People who ate the most antioxidant preservatives had a 22% higher risk of hypertension. Non-antioxidant preservatives are designed to stop harmful microbes, such as mold and bacteria, from growing, whereas antioxidant preservatives are designed to stop oxidation, which means the food will not turn brown or become rancid.

Researchers looked at 17 of the most commonly eaten preservatives and found that eight were specifically linked to high blood pressure: potassium sorbate (E202), potassium metabisulphite (E224), sodium nitrite (E250), ascorbic acid (E300), sodium ascorbate (E301), sodium erythorbate (E316), citric acid (E330), and extracts of rosemary (E392). Ascorbic acid (E300) was also specifically linked to cardiovascular disease. Some of these — like citric acid and ascorbic acid — may surprise people who associate them with natural sources like citrus fruit.

A Warning, Not a Verdict

The results of this observational study do not prove that these food additives cause high blood pressure or directly lead to heart disease — they can only hint at possible associations. Previous research suggests that food preservatives may alter the gut microbiota, liver, or pancreatic functions, which could be contributing to the adverse cardiovascular outcomes. The researchers have called for additional experimental studies to better understand the biological mechanisms at work.

"These findings may have important public health implications as consumers are exposed to these compounds via thousands of foods and drinks," the authors write, adding that the results need to be confirmed by other epidemiological studies, and that additional experimental data are needed to understand the potential mechanisms involved. The same research team had previously reported that higher consumption of food preservatives increased the risk for type 2 diabetes by 40% to 49%, suggesting a broader pattern that regulators and health agencies may no longer be able to ignore. As scrutiny of ultra-processed foods intensifies worldwide, this study adds fresh urgency to the question of what, exactly, we're eating to keep our food from spoiling.