Cheese might be better for your health than you think
FRENCH president Charles de Gaulle once asked: “How can anyone govern a nation that has 246 different kinds of cheese?’ Ireland may have a narrower range of cheeses than France, but the good news is that, contrary to popular belief, cheese confers considerable health benefits.
For example, in a recent article in the European Journal of Nutrition, Chinese researchers analysed 15 well-designed, published studies and reported: “[W]e found that high compared with low cheese consumption was significantly associated with 10–14 % lower risks of cardiovascular disease (CVD). Furthermore, there was a somewhat U-shaped association between cheese consumption and overall CVD risk, with the largest risk reduction observed at cheese consumption of approximately 40 g/d.”
So how much cheese is consumed in Ireland? A recent report from Irish researchers in the British Journal of Nutrition stated that the mean daily intake is 18g. But how can a salty fatty food such as cheese be healthy? I asked Dr Emma Feeney, the report’s lead author and one of Ireland’s leading nutrition experts.
Dr Feeney — who co-ordinates human intervention studies in the Healthy Cheeses work package of Food for Health Ireland research centre – explained that nutrition research has traditionally focussed on single nutrients. However, we eat food, not nutrients. “So we must try,” said Dr Feeney, “to understand how foods as a whole interact when we eat them. The matrix or structure of a food is hugely important.
“This ‘matrix effect’ applies to dairy in general and cheese in particular, whereby the whole seems to more than the sum of the parts.”
Although cheese is a significant source of saturated fat and sodium, Dr Feeney emphasises that cheese is also a concentrated source of nutrients, providing protein, calcium, phosphorus, magnesium, vitamins B12 and K2, and is low in lactose, the main sugar in milk. “Other health benefits,” she adds, “include anti-hypertensive — or blood pressure-lowering — effects in some ripened cheeses, and the fact that casein-based cheeses, ie most cheeses, are low in lactose and suitable for lactose-intolerant individuals.”
When we look at the amount of saturated fat in cheese - about 60% of the fat in dairy fat is saturated - it should be a low density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol-raising food.
Yet Dr Feeney points out that around 10 studies in the last decade have shown that this is not the case: “In the case of cheese, we’ve strong evidence from randomised controlled trials demonstrating that even in large amounts - 100g plus a day, i.e., more than half a block - cheese doesn’t appear to raise LDL-cholesterol compared to the same fat from butter.” But why? It’s to do with that nutrient ‘matrix’ effect: “There are various hypotheses for this effect,” Dr Feeney explains. “Part of the reason is due to the calcium in cheese, which appears to form soaps with some of the fat, resulting in more faecal fat excretion.
“There may also be an effect from the way fat globules are packaged. When butter is churned, the fat droplets are ‘mashed’ up, and the milk fat globule membrane is broken. There’s a small amount of a specific type of fat in this membrane, which is removed when butter is made, but which remains in cheese, and studies suggest that this particular fat can provide a small protective effect as it can influence cholesterol metabolism.”
Dr Feeney points to how easily information about the health benefits of cheese can be misconstrued: “For example, I noticed recently on RTÉ’s Operation Transformation that Katherine Lynch was concerned about high cholesterol, and mentioned a few times that she needed to cut down on cheese.
“This highlights the common misconception that cheese can raise LDL-cholesterol, even though strong scientific evidence contradicts this.” In recent years, there has been much debate about the so-called ‘French paradox’. “The term,” says Feeney, “refers to the fact that when the link between saturated fat intake and heart disease was examined in different countries, there was a strong association between the percentage energy derived from saturated fat and levels of heart disease. But France stood out as having a very high saturated fat intake but low levels of heart disease: a ‘paradox’.
This was originally suggested to be due to the resveratrol in red wine, but researchers now wonder if it is due to the high cheese consumption in France, particularly some of the blue veined cheeses.”
And in a recent report in the journal Medical Hypotheses, French researchers noted that the digestive enzyme intestinal alkaline phosphatase, which has potent anti-inflammatory properties “is directly stimulated by various components of milk (eg casein, calcium, lactose and even fat)”.
It seems that biting into a good hunk of Irish cheese confers more health benefits than you might think.
