If there is a sole food that I could live off of for the rest of my life… it’s cheese. It’s so delicious, especially when it’s gooey and melted and because comes in so many different forms and flavors.
However, most of us are conditioned to believe that this beloved food is unhealthy for us.
Afterall, it’s filled with fat, sodium, cholesterol, and calories and backs you up if you eat too much. Cheese is one of the first foods that we ditch when we decide to go on a diet. However, researchers are helping to rid us of guilt when we consume this dairy delight.
According to a study by researchers at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark which was published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, eating full-fat cheese might actually be good for our hearts.
“We used to assess whether a food is good or bad for your health simply by looking at a label and reading some of the basic information,” Arne Astrup, head of the department of nutrition, exercise, and sports at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, told TIME. “There’s a lot of magic in the food matrix of cheese, and the other components and ingredients in cheese are far more important than the saturated fat and sodium.”
Their study found that changes in “bad” cholesterol levels weren’t that different in subjects who ate regular or reduced-fat cheese, according to Country Living.
There also wasn’t a significant difference in those who had regular fat cheese and no cheese at all. Levels of “good” cholesterol were actually higher in those who at full-fat cheese than those who didn’t eat cheese at all.
The study also pointed out that cheese is chock full of protein and hard to get B12.
A study in the Journal of American Heart Association from 2016 found that eating more than an ounce of cheese a day was linked to a 3 percent lower risk of stroke, lower risk of cardiovascular disease, and was a predictor for longer life.
“Now I eat my cheese without feeling guilty,” Gökhan Hotamisligil, professor of genetics and metabolism at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, told TIME.
And there might be a reason for that. Before you get too excited about this news you should know that the study was partially financed by a group of dairy manufacturers.
Astrup, however, claims that his research was “not biased due to industry influence.” Whatever… we’re going to eat cheese guilt free and pretend we didn’t know that part because if eating cheese is wrong, we don’t want to be right.
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