Common Food Preservatives Linked to High Blood Pressure and Heart Disease

Sophia Antipolis, France – 21 May 2026: 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 [1] today (Thursday).

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, PhD student, both from the Nutritional Epidemiology Research Team at the Université Sorbonne Paris Nord and Université Paris Cité, France.

Ms Hasenböhler said: “Food preservatives are used in hundreds of thousands of industrially processed foods. Experimental studies suggest that some preservative food additives may be harmful to cardiovascular health, but we have not had enough evidence on the impact of these ingredients in humans. As far as we know, this is the first study of its kind to investigate the links between a wide range of preservatives and cardiovascular health.”

The research is part of a larger study, called NutriNet-Santé, and included 112,395 volunteers from across France. Every six months, the volunteers told researchers everything they ate and drank over a period of three days.

Researchers carried out detailed analyses of the ingredients of all the food and drink, including any preservatives. They also tracked the volunteers’ health for an average of seven to eight years to see if they developed high blood pressure or any cardiovascular disease.