It's the favorite food of starving college kids and busy families everywhere, and on days when you just don't feel like cooking you've probably enjoyed some instant noodles yourself.

They're a cheap and easy-to-make snack, plus you can pick your favorite flavor from a wide variety - but deep down we all know that they're not very healthy. Still, you may be surprised to learn just how bad for you these popular meals are.

New research from Harvard's School of Public Health confirms that you should keep this out of your grocery cart if you worry about your family's health. Eating instant ramen often enough can lead to a number of health risks.

The new study, which is published in the Journal of Nutrition, links eating noodles regularly to a whole host of heart risks. Eating them could give you metabolic syndrome, the group of symptoms like high blood pressure and high cholesterol that increase your risk of diabetes or a heart attack.

While lots of foods are bad for you noodles create a pretty drastic risk: women in the study who ate noodles at least twice a week had a 68% higher risk of developing metabolic syndrome.

Like all foods that hurt your heart, noodles are very high in sodium. But they're also harder to digest because they're loaded with preservatives.

The ingredients that keep your noodles fresh after sitting in your cupboard for months - including the preservative TBHQ - are a pain for your body to digest.

An experiment by New York's school of design found it took hours longer for your body to digest instant noodles compared to the real thing.

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