Holy hotplates! Instant ramen noodles, beloved cheap dinner of college kids and budget eaters everywhere, have been linked to heart attacks and diabetes¹。

A study published in the Journal of Nutrition found that the ramen, along with other instant noodle products, may increase a person’s risk for cardiometabolic syndrome³ — a risk factor for severe cardiovascular disease and stroke — especially in women。

“This research is significant since many people are consuming instant noodles without knowing possible health risks,” said lead researcher Hyun Joon Shin, MD, in a press release. Shin, a clinical cardiology fellow at Baylor University Medical Center and a nutrition epidemiology doctoral student at the Harvard School of Public Health, could not be reached for further comment。

For the study, researchers looked at the data of 10,711 adults between the ages of 19 and 64, collected via the nationally representative Korean National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey of 2007-2009. They found that eating instant noodles — ramen, lo mein, glass, Thai, or other — twice or more a week was associated withcardiometabolic syndrome, a collection of abnormalities affecting the body’s cardiovascular, renal, and metabolic² systems。

Although the specific cause of the problem was not immediately clear, Shin noted⁴ that it might stem from the fact that most instant noodle meals come packaged in Styrofoam, which contains bisphenol A (BPA)， a known hormone⁵ disruptor — which is also why women could have been more affected⁶ in this study. But the food product contains plenty of unhealthy ingredients, including MSG and the chemical preservative⁷ tertiary-butylhydroquinone (TBHQ)， and is also high in saturated⁸ fat。

The study focused on individuals in South Korea, Shin said, as the country has the highest per-capita number of instant noodle consumers in the world, and because, in recent years, health problems there, including heart disease and obesity⁹, have been on the rise. But the findings appear to be quite relevant to consumers stateside too, as the United States ranked sixth globally in instant noodle sales, according to the World Instant Noodles Association, which found that the United States accounted for 4,300 billion units sold in 2013 (coming in just behind China, Indonesia, Japan, Vietnam, and India — and one spot above South Korea, in fact)。

This is not the first time ramen noodles have been publicly maligned¹⁰. In 2012, a viral video taken from inside the digestive tract¹¹, part of a small and inconclusive study by Dr. Braden Kuo, showed just what happened after instant ramen was ingested — and it wasn’t pretty. The stomach worked overtime¹², struggling for hours to grind up the strands¹³; TBHQ, a petroleum¹⁴ byproduct, was named as a possible culprit. Years earlier, Malaysian health officials issued a warningagainst eating instant noodles because of ingredients such as thickeners, stabilizers, sodium¹⁵, and preservatives¹⁶ that have been linked to heart disease, stroke, and kidney damage。

Nissin Foods, maker¹⁷ of the first instant ramen noodle in Japan in 1958 (and the company that brought Top Ramen to the US in 1972)， did not respond to a request for comment from Yahoo Health。

The bottom line? Ingest the cheap and filling noodles at your own risk。