"Is Cheese Healthy? Compared to What?
When industry-funded studies suggest their products
have neutral health effects, or even beneficial,
one question you always have to ask is compared to what?
Is cheese healthy? Compared to what?
If you're sitting down to make a sandwich, cheese is probably healthy—
compared to bologna—but compared to peanut butter? No way.
That's the point Walt Willet made, former chair of nutrition at Harvard.
To conclude that dairy foods are "neutral" could be misleading, as
it could be misinterpreted to mean that increasing consumption of dairy foods
would have no effects on cardiovascular disease or mortality.
Lost is that the health effects of increasing
or decreasing consumption of dairy foods would depend
importantly on the specific foods that are substituted for dairy foods.
Like what are you going to put on your salad?
Cheese would be healthy compared to bacon, but not compared to nuts.
See, consumption of nuts or plant protein
has been found to be protectively associated
with the risk of coronary heart disease and type 2 diabetes.
In contrast, intake of red meat, for example, has been associated
with increased risk.
Thus, it's reasonable to assume that the lack of association with dairy foods
could put them somewhere in the middle of a spectrum of healthfulness,
but certainly not an optimal source of energy or protein.
More broadly, the available evidence supports policies
that limit dairy production and encourages production
of healthier sources of proteins and fats.
He wasn't just speculating.
This was based on three famous Harvard studies involving hundreds of thousands
of men and women exceeding 5 million person-years of follow-up.
This was really the first large-scale prospective study to examine dairy fat
intake, compared to other types of fat in relation to heart attack and stroke risk.
So replacing like 100 calories of fat worth of cheese
with 100 calories of fat worth of peanut butter on a daily basis
might reduce risk up to 24%,
whereas substitution with other animal fats might make things worse.
Here's how it breaks down for heart disease.
Swapping dairy fat for like vegetable oil would be associated
with a decrease in disease risk, whereas swapping dairy for meat increases risk.
Dairy fat calories may be as bad or worse as straight sugar.
The lowest risk would entail swapping to a whole plant food, like whole grains.
Yeah, dairy products are a major contributor
to the saturated fat in the diet and have thus been targeted as
one of the main dietary causes of, you know, the #1 killer of men and women.
But the dairy industry likes to argue
there are other things in dairy products like fermentation by-products
in cheese that could counteract the saturated fat effects,
all part of an explicit campaign by the dairy industry to neutralize
the negative image of milkfat among regulators and health professionals.
If Global Dairy Platform looks familiar, they were one of the funders
of the milk-and-dairy-is-neutral study,
trotting out their dairy-fat- is-counteracted notion.
To which the American Heart Association responds that
no information from controlled studies supports the assertion
that fermentation adds beneficial nutrients to cheese
that somehow counteract the harmful effects of the saturated fat.
We need to cut down on dairy, meat, coconut oil,
no matter what their respective industries say.
In fact, that's the reason the American Heart Association
felt that they needed to release this special Presidential Advisory in 2017.
They wanted to set the record straight on why well-conducted scientific research
overwhelmingly supports limiting saturated fat in the diet.