What’s in Our Food: Preservatives, Cancer Risk & the Fight for Food Justice

Walking through the grocery store, it is easy to feel confident about the choices you are making. A quick stop at the deli counter for sandwich meat, a box of pastries for breakfast, a ready-made sauce to save time on a busy night. But what if those everyday staples came with ingredients you did not sign up for? Hidden additives like nitrites, nitrates, and sorbates might seem like harmless tools to keep food fresh. Yet growing research suggests these chemicals could be doing more harm than we realize — and the communities bearing the greatest burden are the ones with the least access to alternatives.

What a 14-Year Study Found

The NutriNet-Santé study in France followed 105,260 participants over 14 years, tracking not just broad food categories but the specific brands and ingredients people consumed daily. This level of precision allowed researchers to trace how particular preservatives were entering everyday diets — and to assess their long-term health impacts with unusual specificity.

The additives flagged are not obscure chemicals. They are in foods that millions of families rely on every week. Sodium nitrite, found in many processed meats like deli slices and sausages, was linked to a 32% higher risk of prostate cancer. Potassium nitrate was connected to a 22% higher risk of breast cancer and a 13% increase in overall cancer diagnoses. Sorbates — common in baked goods and wine — showed a 26% higher risk of breast cancer in frequent consumers.

Importantly, of the 17 preservatives studied, 11 showed no significant association with cancer. This is not about condemning all food preservation — it is about naming the specific compounds that warrant caution, and asking who bears the cost when those compounds are everywhere in the food supply of communities with the least power to demand better.

The Food Justice Dimension

Here is what the research does not say directly, but what our communities already know: food deserts are not randomly distributed. They are concentrated in Black, brown, and low-income neighborhoods — the same communities where processed food is most heavily marketed, where fresh produce is least available, and where the cumulative health burden of environmental and dietary stressors falls hardest.

When more than 20% of packaged foods contain at least one of the flagged additives, and those packaged foods are the primary option in many neighborhoods, this stops being a conversation about individual dietary choices. It becomes a conversation about structural violence — slow, invisible, profitable for some and deadly for others.

Our ancestors understood food as medicine. They understood that the relationship between community and food source was sacred — that what fed the body also fed the spirit and the lineage. The severing of that relationship, through slavery, through urbanization, through the deliberate dismantling of Black farming communities, through the flooding of low-income neighborhoods with ultra-processed food — is a wound with measurable health consequences. This research is part of naming that wound, one that reaches beyond the body into mood and mind, as we explore in what we eat shapes how we feel.

What You Can Do: Small Steps, Systemic Demands

Individual choices matter — and they are not the whole answer. Both things are true. Here is how to hold both:

Read labels with intention. When you can, look for the specific additives flagged by this research: sodium nitrite, potassium nitrate, potassium sorbate, sorbic acid, erythorbates. Awareness is a starting point.

Shift when possible, not when perfect. Swapping one packaged item a week for a fresh or minimally processed alternative adds up over time. Frozen fruits and vegetables — often more affordable — carry none of these preservatives and retain most of their nutritional value.

Cook in community. Meal preparation shared across households reduces the time and cost barrier that makes processed food feel necessary. This is not a new idea — it is an ancestral one. The communal kitchen has always been one of the village’s most powerful health technologies.

Advocate loudly. The researchers behind this study are calling for a reevaluation of regulations governing these food additives. That call needs community voices behind it. Demand clearer labeling. Support organizations working on food sovereignty in your neighborhood. Name the structural conditions that make ultra-processed food the default for millions of families who deserve better.

References & Sources

1. Touvier, M., et al. (2019). Consumption of ultra-processed foods and cancer risk: results from NutriNet-Santé. BMJ. bmj.com
2. IARC. Carcinogenicity of consumption of red and processed meat. iarc.who.int
3. EFSA. Sorbic acid and potassium sorbate safety assessment. efsa.europa.eu
4. USDA Economic Research Service. Food Access Research Atlas. ers.usda.gov

Related Reading

• Food Desert vs Food Swamp: What’s the Difference?
• Reparations as Public Health: The Case for Healing What Policy Created
• Food Deserts Are Spiritual Violence: Reclaiming Nourishment as a Sacred Act
• The Hidden Health Crisis in Black America: What History, Science, and Our Ancestors Are Trying to Tell Us