a good day for cheese

Woohoo! I would be curious what percentage of our monthly food bills is spent on the enormous amount of cheese that comes through our house. This only reinforces those tendencies. 

Great News, America: Cheese Isn’t Bad for You
Don’t feel sheepish reaching for that manchego. Cheese doesn’t deserve its unhealthy reputation.

CHEESE IS AMONG the ultimate guilty pleasures. It’s gooey. It’s fatty. It’s delicious. It just has to be bad for you, right?

Wrong. A large body of research suggests that cheese’s reputation as a fattening, heart-imperiling food is undeserved. When it comes to weight and other key health outcomes (and setting aside the issue of lactose intolerance, with apologies), cheese is neutral at worst, and possibly even good for you. And yet that research doesn’t seem to have broken through into common knowledge. If you Google “cheese,” the top result under “people also ask” is the ungrammatical query “Why cheese is bad for you?” Now, if you’re the type of person who’s thinking, “What’s the big deal? I eat what I like, in moderation, and don’t worry about calories”—congratulations, I’m happy for you, we have lots of great articles about science and tech you might enjoy. If, on the other hand, you’re like me and worry that your diet is making you gradually fatter, keep reading.

The best evidence for the benign impact of cheese comes from long-term cohort studies that tracked the health and eating habits of tens or hundreds of thousands of people. A 2011 paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine analyzed three cohorts that together tracked 120,877 US adults over several decades. The authors found that foods like potatoes, processed meats, and refined grains were associated with weight gain over time, while yogurt, fruit, and nuts were associated with weight loss. Cheese was right in the middle: On average, eating more or less of it had essentially no effect on weight.

Click below to read more.

via {wired}