• Posted September 26, 2025

Early MS Patients Fare Worse If They Eat Junk Food

Ultra-processed foods could be making matters worse for people in the early throes of multiple sclerosis (MS), a new study says.

Higher consumption of ultra-processed eats is linked to more frequent relapses in early MS patients, researchers reported Thursday at the annual meeting of the European Committee for Treatment and Research in Multiple Sclerosis in Barcelona.

Brain scans also revealed more activity in MS lesions of people who ate more ultra-processed foods, researchers found.

“I would recommend ultra-processed food reduction as a valuable supporting strategy for early MS management,” study leader Gloria Dalla Costa, a researcher at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, said in a news release.

“Similar to vitamin D supplementation or smoking cessation advice, this is not about replacing established therapies, but about complementing them,” she said. “It’s a low-risk, potentially high-benefit intervention.”

Ultra-processed foods are made mostly from substances extracted from whole foods, like saturated fats, starches and added sugars. They also contain a wide variety of additives to make them more tasty, attractive and shelf-stable, including colors, emulsifiers, flavors and stabilizers.

Examples include packaged baked goods, sugary cereals, sodas, ready-to-eat or ready-to-heat products, and deli cold cuts.

For the new study, researchers tracked 451 patients with early MS, using blood samples to estimate their intake of ultra-processed foods.

MS occurs when the immune system starts attacking the protective sheath that covers nerve cells, which is called myelin. This causes wide-ranging and irreversible damage, impairing people’s ability to move, damaging their vision and causing problems with mood and memory.

People with early MS often will enter long periods of remission, with weeks or months of recovery between symptom flare-ups.

Results showed that high levels of ultra-processed foods were not linked with the onset of MS.

However, they were associated with larger brain lesions caused by the disease, as well as lower brain function scores among the MS patients.

During a five-year follow-up, patients who ate the most ultra-processed foods had about 30% more relapses than those who ate the least, researchers found.

And after two years, they also had a higher rate of new active lesions and a larger increase in the size of existing lesions, the study found.

“This pattern suggests ultra-processed foods act as a chronic inflammatory accelerant rather than a disease trigger, amplifying existing inflammatory processes in MS rather than determining whether someone develops the disease in the first place,” Della Costa said.

The additives in these foods, like emulsifiers and preservatives, might disrupt the gut in ways that “can allow bacterial endotoxins to enter the bloodstream and trigger immune activation that reaches the brain,” she said.

The high levels of fats in these manufactured foods might make myelin more vulnerable to autoimmune attack, Della Costa added, or the metabolic stress on the body caused by the eats might limit the brain’s ability to withstand and repair MS-related damage.

“Overall, our findings suggest ultra-processed food consumption creates a cascade of biological disruptions that amplify MS inflammatory activity,” she concluded.

The team next hopes to replicate its findings using other groups of MS patients, and to further delve into the ways these foods might harm patients’ health.

Findings presented at medical meetings should be considered preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.

More information

Yale Medicine has more on the health effects of ultra-processed foods.

SOURCE: European Committee for Treatment and Research in Multiple Sclerosis, news release, Sept. 25, 2025