The label reads exactly the way it’s supposed to. Sodium nitrite, potassium sorbate, citric acid, ascorbic acid. They’re listed in small print, well below the calorie count, sandwiched between ingredients you can actually picture. And because you’ve seen those words a thousand times on a thousand packages, you’ve probably stopped registering them as anything worth thinking about. They’re just the stuff that keeps the food from going bad. They’re how your deli ham stays pink for three weeks, how the shredded cheese in the resealable bag doesn’t bloom with mold before you get to the bottom of it. They are, by every official account, safe.
That’s what makes a major new study so worth paying attention to – not because it confirms what health-food fanatics have been saying for years, not because it’s going to make you throw out your refrigerator, but because the scale and specificity of the research is genuinely different from anything that came before it. This isn’t a rodent study or a small clinical trial. It’s over a decade of eating data from more than a hundred thousand people, run through some of the most rigorous dietary tracking methodology in epidemiology. And the picture it draws about those small-print ingredients is one that’s hard to dismiss.
What the Research Actually Found
Eating foods that contain common preservative food additives may increase the risks of high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease, according to research published in the European Heart Journal. The research was led by Dr. Mathilde Touvier, a research director at INSERM (the French National Institute for Health and Medical Research), and Anaïs Hasenböhler, a PhD student, both from the Nutritional Epidemiology Research Team at Université Paris Cité.
Experimental studies have long suggested that some preservative food additives may be harmful to cardiovascular health, but researchers had not had enough evidence on the impact of these ingredients in humans – making this the first study of its kind to investigate links between a wide range of preservatives and cardiovascular health.
The study drew from the NutriNet-Santé cohort, a large French research project tracking participants’ eating habits and health outcomes since 2009. For this analysis, 112,395 people were included, nearly 79% of them women, with an average age at enrollment of about 43. The median follow-up period was 7.9 years, running through the end of 2024. Participants completed up to 96 detailed dietary records, logging everything consumed right down to the specific brand, which allowed researchers to cross-reference multiple food composition databases and conduct laboratory tests to identify which preservatives were present and in what amounts.
Common preservatives used in many store-bought foods to kill bacteria and mold were linked to a 29% greater risk of elevated blood pressure and a 16% higher risk of heart attacks and stroke. Those are not marginal numbers. A 29% greater risk of hypertension (high blood pressure – the persistent, artery-straining kind that most people won’t feel until it causes a problem) is a signal researchers take seriously.
The Preservatives Under the Microscope
Researchers examined 17 preservatives consumed by at least 10% of participants and found eight were associated with higher blood pressure over the next decade. Three of those – potassium sorbate, potassium metabisulphite, and sodium nitrite – are “non-antioxidant” preservatives, meaning they work by killing bacteria, molds, and yeast that spoil foods.
Potassium sorbate is often found in wine, baked goods, cheeses, and sauces. Potassium metabisulphite, which releases sulfur dioxide when dissolved, appears in wine, juice, cider, beer, and other fermented beverages. Sodium nitrite is a chemical salt used in processed meats like bacon, ham, and deli meats. If you cook from scratch but still grab a package of sliced turkey at the grocery store most weeks, or pour a glass of wine on a Friday evening, these compounds are almost certainly in your regular rotation.
Sulphites, often present in wine and dried fruit, were also linked with elevated hypertension rates in the findings. Again, not exotic ingredients. Not things you have to seek out. Things sitting in your pantry right now, probably.
The Twist: Even the “Natural” Ones
Here is where the study starts to feel genuinely uncomfortable, because the concerning preservatives aren’t limited to the ones that sound chemical. Ascorbic acid, listed as E300 and commonly recognized as vitamin C, showed associations with higher hypertension and cardiovascular disease risk when used as a preservative. Citric acid and rosemary extract also appeared among the additives connected with increased risk – which sounds contradictory, because vitamin C-rich foods are widely associated with heart health.
Even the so-called “natural” antioxidant preservatives used to stop discoloration, such as citric acid and ascorbic acid, led to a 22% greater risk of high blood pressure in people who ate more foods with those ingredients.
The explanation researchers point to involves something called the food matrix – the idea that a molecule behaves differently depending on what surrounds it. Vitamin C inside an orange exists alongside fiber, water, and plant compounds that influence digestion and absorption. When that same molecule is isolated, manufactured, and dropped into a packaged product to slow oxidation, it’s arriving without any of that biological context. While antioxidants such as citric and ascorbic acid are found naturally in foods like fruits, they are “not exactly natural” when used as preservatives, as senior author Mathilde Touvier put it.
As Touvier, who is also director of research at France’s National Institute of Health and Medical Research, explained: “Naturally occurring ascorbic acid and added ascorbic acid – which may be chemically manufactured – may have different impacts on health.” The vitamin C in your orange and the ascorbic acid listed at the bottom of an ingredient panel may share a name and a molecular structure, but they reach your bloodstream through entirely different doors.
Preservatives Aren’t Just in Ultra-Processed Foods
One of the most practically important findings in the study is one that rarely makes it into headlines. One assumption worth challenging is that avoiding ultra-processed foods would be enough to sidestep significant preservative exposure. Prior research from the same team found that only about 35% of preservative-containing foods that people consumed were classified as ultra-processed, meaning preservatives appear across a much wider range of products – including items many consumers would not associate with heavy processing.
The mental shortcut most of us use (“I don’t eat junk food, so I’m probably fine”) may not hold. The cheese that costs twice as much as the store brand, the artisan wine, the “natural” deli slices at the counter – these are still processed foods in the relevant sense. The preservatives don’t care about the branding. Understanding that heart health involves the cumulative picture of what’s in your food, not just the broad category it belongs to, is worth keeping in mind alongside other research on cardiovascular risk factors – including new findings about how cholesterol is absorbed and moved through the body.
How to Read This Without Spiraling
The researchers themselves are clear that this is an observational study – it shows association, not causation. This is an observational study, which means participants were not randomly allocated to consume more or fewer preservatives, so researchers cannot be sure that people who consumed more preservatives weren’t different from those who consumed fewer in other ways that affected their cardiovascular risk.
The study’s authors noted the results “need to be confirmed by other epidemiological studies,” and experimental research is needed to gain further insight into underlying mechanisms. The study also stated that if confirmed, “these new data call for the re-evaluation of regulations governing the use of these additives to improve consumer protection.”
The findings add new dimension to what researchers already know about ultraprocessed foods – that they carry roughly a 50% higher risk of cardiovascular disease-related death. This latest research suggests the relationship between processed foods and cardiovascular disease may not run entirely through fat and sodium content, but also through specific chemical additives that have until now been considered a separate question.
The results support findings from two other studies by Touvier and her team which found similar links between preservatives and a much higher risk of cancer and type 2 diabetes. Six preservatives – including sodium nitrite, potassium nitrate, sorbates, and potassium metabisulfite – were linked to up to a 32% higher risk of prostate cancer, breast cancer, and cancer of all kinds. The same research team keeps turning up the same names. That pattern is hard to write off as coincidence, even if the science is still working out the mechanism.
Read More: 10+ Foods Most Likely to Be Contaminated with Microplastics
What This Means for You
None of this means you need to read every label like it’s a legal document or approach your refrigerator with suspicion. The study doesn’t say that one serving of deli ham causes heart disease, and nothing here suggests a dramatic overnight overhaul of how you eat. What it does suggest, and what the researchers themselves point to, is that the cumulative, daily, years-long exposure to these preservatives is where the risk lives. That’s a different kind of reckoning than a single food being bad for you.
The practical implication is a gentle reordering of priorities, not a panic. Fresh food, when you can. Less of the packaged products that have the longest shelf lives, not because they’re forbidden but because shelf life is built on chemistry, and that chemistry may matter more than we’ve been told. The next time you’re choosing between the sauces or reaching for the cured meats, you have more information than you did before – and you can do something proportionate with it. Not everything, not perfectly. Just more, and more often.
AI Disclaimer: This article was created with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by a human editor.