Do you have an undying love of cheese but are worried about its health effects? Well, you might be in luck. An appetizing piece of research out this week hints that a little sharp cheddar could actually help sharpen your mind.
Scientists examined data from a long-running population study of Swedish residents. People who regularly reported eating high-fat cheese were less likely to develop dementia over the next two decades than people who didn’t. Though the findings don’t conclusively prove that cheese will help prevent dementia, they do suggest the food can be eaten without too much worry about your noggin.
“Cheese, even high-fat cheese, in reasonable amounts as part of a balanced diet does not seem to harm brain health and may be linked to a slightly lower risk of dementia,” study author Emily Sonestedt, a nutrition scientist at Lund University, told Gizmodo.
Cheese on the brain
As essential as food is to our vitality, figuring out the health benefits of a specific ingredient is harder than it might seem. Compared to an experimental drug, it’s not easy to isolate one particular food and study it in a controlled setting. And observational studies of our nutrition tend to have many drawbacks.
Sonestedt notes that some earlier studies using observational data from countries like Japan and the UK have pointed to a possible connection between cheese consumption and reduced dementia risk.
“However, these results have often been based on smaller samples or shorter follow-up,” she said. “Our study is different in that it includes nearly 28,000 adults, followed over 25 years, with very detailed dietary measurements and validated dementia diagnoses.”
The team used data from Lund University’s Malmö Diet and Cancer study. Since the 1990s, the project has been proactively tracking the health of middle-aged residents in the city of Malmö. At the beginning of the study, the participants were also asked to jot down their typical diet, including how much and the kind of cheese they routinely ate. High-fat cheese was defined as any cheese containing more than 20% fat, such as cheddar, Gouda, and blue cheese.
About 3,200 participants were diagnosed with dementia during the study period. And those who ate plenty of high-fat cheese—50 grams or more a day on average—had a modest but noticeably lower risk of developing it, the researchers found. For context, 50 grams of cheese would amount to roughly two standard slices or between one half and one third of a cup of shredded cheese.
About 10% of cheese lovers developed dementia during the study, compared to 13% of people who ate 15 grams or less of high-fat cheese a day. After accounting for other factors like age, education, or people’s diet quality in general, high-fat cheese consumption was associated with a 13% lower risk of dementia and a 29% lower risk of vascular dementia (the second most common form), the researchers calculated. A similar pattern was also seen with people who regularly ate high-fat cream.
The team’s findings were published Wednesday in Neurology.
What should this mean to you?
Prospective observational studies can offer stronger evidence of a cause-and-effect link between two factors (in this case, cheese and reduced dementia risk). But they still have their caveats.
This study, for instance, only measured diets once, so it’s possible some people might have started eating more or less cheese as they aged. Another consideration is that Swedish residents were studied exclusively, and there are important differences between Sweden and countries like the U.S. The former country’s health care is generally better, for one, and even their cheese habits aren’t quite the same—Swedes tend to eat their cheese raw, whereas Americans are more likely to cook it (and plop it onto a juicy burger).
At the same time, there has been an ongoing scientific debate over just how healthy or detrimental cheese and other foods relatively high in fat might be for a person’s aging brain, Sonestedt says. People on the MIND diet—a hybrid of the Mediterranean and DASH diets linked to better brain health—are told to limit their cheese consumption, for instance. However, the team’s results indicate that cheese doesn’t have to be kept under lock and key just for the sake of your brain.
Don’t let these tasty findings distract you from the other fundamentals of staying mentally fit, though.
“The most important things for your brain are still the basics: not smoking, staying physically and socially active, keeping blood pressure, blood sugar and weight under control, and eating a generally healthy pattern,” Sonestedt said. “Cheese can be part of the healthy diet.”
The researchers hope that future studies can continue to unravel the link between cheese eating and dementia. Ideally, these studies would look at other countries and be able to track people’s diets over time. They’re also planning to study other dietary factors using their existing dataset.
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