LOWELL — Processed foods surround you from all corners as you push a shopping cart through the grocery store.
Dozens of meats at the deli counter — packed with additives and compounds.
Scores of pastries and white bread in the bakery section — full of preservatives that improve shelf life.
And plenty of shrink-wrapped turkey, chicken and fish — enhanced with chemicals that keep the protein looking plumped-up and juicy.
As UMass Lowell professor Katherine Tucker strolls through the grocery store nowadays, she won’t go anywhere near these products. Tucker, who’s studying the connection between processed foods and dementia, hopes other shoppers will consider doing the same in the future.
“I think that most people don’t realize how important nutrition is as you age,” said Tucker, director of UMass Lowell’s Center for Population Health. “And that our food supply right now is not as supportive of that as it could be.
“We want to improve people’s understanding of the importance of nutrition for aging, so people choose a better diet,” she added.
Tucker, 62, of Westford, recently received a $3.9 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to study the effects of highly processed foods on cognitive decline.
The five-year study aims to find out if consuming processed foods such as white rice, soda, frozen meals and deli meat contributes to dementia.
“All together, these foods are really taking a toll,” Tucker said when asked about her research hypothesis.
“We believe processed foods leads to early dementia for several reasons: A vitamin B6 deficiency, a high-intake of phosphorus, and the displacement of healthy foods by eating this highly-processed food supply,” she added.
Tucker, a professor of nutritional epidemiology in the Department of Biomedical and Nutritional Sciences, has been following the nutrition and health risk factors of 1,500 people originally from Puerto Rico who live in in the Boston area for a series of studies that began 12 years ago.
This new research will look at about 700 participants of that project to determine if there’s a connection between diet and dementia.
Past research led by Tucker showed that vitamin B6 deficiency was associated with inflammation, oxidative stress, metabolic syndrome, diabetes and depressive symptoms in adult participants. Now, Tucker will study the effects of phosphorus and vitamin B6 on the brain.
Phosphorus has been added to highly-processed foods, and too much of the nutrient is harmful. There’s evidence that high phosphorus decreases an anti-aging hormone, which results in an increased risk of early aging.
While phosphorus intake tends to be too high in the U.S. population, vitamin B6 intake tends to be too low. The vitamin, which is important in keeping the brain and nervous system functioning properly, can be easily lost when manufacturers process foods.
“Vitamin B6 is very important for multiple reactions in the body, several that involve the brain,” Tucker said. “We really have to be concerned with anything that could be preventable to help maintain cognitive function because we’re going to have an epidemic of dementia as the population ages.”
Foods that contain vitamin B6 when not processed include nuts, seeds, beans, poultry, fish, potatoes and bananas.
Years ago, refined foods were causing deficiency diseases, so food companies added back riboflavin and niacin to these products. However, they never added back vitamin B6.
For decades, people ate cookies and crackers full of trans fat. Once people learned trans fat had a connection to heart disease, they demanded the food industry to remove trans fat from their products, according to Tucker.
“So I’m trying to make people aware that vitamin B6 is low and phosphorus is high, which could lead to cognitive decline,” Tucker said. “Before anyone is going to take it seriously, we need to prove that it has an effect.”
By using data from the Boston Puerto Rican Health Study, Tucker and her team will analyze diet, nutritional biomarkers and change in cognitive function by adding new outcome measures.
About 700 of the participants will return for a repeat battery of cognitive exams and about 350 for MRIs to assess relationships with brain size and cell losses.
“We’ll be able to measure total brain volume, blood flow to see if things are getting slowed down, and damage measures,” Tucker said. “We can look at all these things to tell the brain function to a very good degree.”
Researchers will test the subjects’ memory, attention, speed and complex decision-making.
It will take about two years to collect data, and then 18 months to analyze it.
In the meantime, what should people choose at the grocery store? Tucker says that alternatives to processed foods are still more expensive and not available to everybody — such as grass-fed beef, and cage-free egg and chickens.
She’s optimistic that organic and fresher foods will be more available in the near future.
“More and more people are demanding better quality foods, and we’re seeing more available in our supermarkets than ever before,” Tucker said. “I see it moving in the right direction, with the cost going down and with education and better policies.
“Then we can slowly improve the quality of aging for the whole population,” she added.
Follow Rick Sobey on Twitter @rsobeyLSun.