By Add extra parmesan to your pasta tonight as the greatest study of all time has discovered that eating cheese could actually make you live longer.
Say what? Cheese might actually be good for you? Old-school thinking is that cheese is unhealthy, in large part because of all its saturated fat. But newer research calls into question the link between saturated fat and heart disease. In fact, eating cheese (nibbling, not gorging) is linked with numerous health benefits.
Researchers from McMaster University in Canada looked at the dietary habits of over 130,000 people from 21 different countries between the ages of 35 and 70. After analyzing their data, the researchers placed the people into two distinct groups: reduced-fat dairy and full-fat dairy.
The study concluded that eating more than two servings of cheese per day was in line with seeing a major decrease in the risk of a stroke and a decreased risk of cardiovascular disease. They also saw that dairy products itself played a part in the study, noting that milk of yogurt would be beneficial to your health as well.
Many of us have been conditioned to think that cheese isn’t the best thing for you and to thus enjoy in moderation, but Ian Givens, a professor of food chain nutrition at Reading University, says that this study is vital to changing public perception of dairy:
“It also adds weight to the evidence that saturated fats from dairy [probably apart from butter] are not associated with increased cardiovascular disease risk, unlike some other sources,” explained Givens.
Mahshid Dehghan, who was the lead author on this study, argued that we shouldn’t rule out dairy products just because they happen to produce a lot of fatty acids.
“Dairy products contain a range of potentially beneficial compounds including specific amino acids, medium-chain and odd-chain saturated fats, milk fat globule phospholipids, unsaturated and branched-chain fats, natural trans fats, vitamin K1/K2, and calcium, and can further be fermented or contain probiotics, many of which may also affect health outcomes.”
Cheese, I love you so.