Early studies suggest that cheese may be protective against heart disease.
Go ahead, finish off that wheel of Brie, that brick of cheddar, or that blob of mozzarella. Your heart may thank you.
Last month, a group of Danish scientists investigated why the French
don’t seem to suffer from cardiovascular disease as much as their high
saturated fat, high cholesterol diets would suggest. The researchers
looked to diet to explain this so-called French Paradox, and what do the
French eat a lot of? Cheese. In 2013, the French led the pack in
cheese consumption worldwide—closely followed by Iceland and Finland.
So the team had 15 young-to-middle aged men follow three different
diets for two weeks at a time. Each diet had the same amount of
calories: one was high in 1.5% milk fat, another was high in cheese, and
a third allowed butter but no other dairy.
The scientists then took a close look at the men’s urine and feces to
see what came out after the dairy went in. Men on the milk and cheese
diets excreted higher levels of molecules called short-chain fatty acids
which are thought to be anti-inflammatory and lower levels of a
molecule called TMAO, made by gut microbes when they break down
animal-based foods and linked to cardiovascular disease. The authors
speculated that the cheese and milk might be altering gut bacteria to
somehow make more of the beneficial short chain fatty acids and less of
the potentially damaging TMAO.
“The most interesting thing to me is the short chain fatty acid and
immunology angle,” says Kevin Bonham, a post-doctoral scholar who
studies the microbial communities in cheese and writes for the
Scientific American blog,
Food Matters.
“The study size is pretty small, but at the same time it it’s certainly suggestive of an interesting link.”
This study, despite being funded by a dairy company, aligns with
other work in the field that draws correlations between cheese and dairy
consumption and protective effects in cardiovascular and metabolic
disease, says Gökhan Hotamisligil, chair of genetics and complex
diseases at the Harvard School of Public Health.
Not everyone is sold on cheese’s benefits, though. Kim Williams, a
cardiologist at Rush University Medical Center, president of the
American College of Cardiology, and a vegan, is less certain that diet
explains the French Paradox. “I spent a lot of time in Paris and other
parts of France, and what you don’t see is inactive people who are
overweight,” he says, adding that further studies need to be done to
first tease out the lifestyle factors that are contributing to it and
second to compare the risk for cardiovascular disease of animal-based
diets versus plant-based diets. “It shouldn’t just be more cheese versus
less cheese or cheese versus butter, it actually should be a
plant-based diet versus the animal products,” he says.
“Whether or not cheese will solve French paradox, I think, remains to
be seen,” Hotamisligil says. Nevertheless, “As a big cheese lover, I am
loving to read these sort of findings,” he jokes. “Wine is good, cheese
is good, so I’m all set.”
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