It’s the news every dairy lover has been waiting to read: eating more cheese and high-fat cream is associated with a lower risk of developing dementia. But… is it too good to be true?
Contrary to the ancient myth that people are forgetful because they eat too much cheese, according to recent studies, this dairy product actually brings benefits to our brain.
A first one, published in October in Nutrientson a list of foods that reduce the risk of dementia; a new, more extensive study, published last week in Neurology, obtained the same results.
“For decades, the debate between high-fat and low-fat diets has shaped health advice, sometimes classifying cheese as an unhealthy food to limit,” he said. Emily Sonestedtnutritional epidemiologist at Lund University, Sweden, and principal investigator of the study, in a statement published on .
“We have found, however, that some high-fat dairy products can actually reduce the risk of dementiacalling into question some old ideas about fat and brain health”, added the researcher.
For cheese fans, this might sounds too good to be true. And, according to some experts, tmaybe it is. So what’s the catch?
What does the study say?
Although the work deserves criticism, scale is not one of them: Researchers analyzed data from 27,670 people over at least 18 yearsbeginning in the early 1990s.
The participants, with ages between 45 and 73 years old and residents of Sweden, were invited to fill out a written questionnaire and participate in an interview about their eating habits, in addition to keeping a seven-day food diary.
Later, in 2014 and 2020, the team followed up, using the Swedish National Patient Register to identify which participants had developed dementia.
The data was then analyzed to look for links between consumption of specific types of dairy products and the risk of dementia.
At first sight, the results seem relatively clear. Among people who reported consuming at least 50 grams of high-fat cheese per day, about one in 10 developed dementia until 2020.
Among those who consumed less than 15 grams per day, more than 1 in 8 had developed the disease. In other words: higher cheese consumption was associated with a lower incidence of dementia.
Of course there are many variables that can confound this relationshiphighlights: smoking and alcohol consumption, BMI and blood pressuremarital status and education, associated diseases such as diabetes, a known risk factor for dementia, among others.
Still, even after they have adjusted these factorsresearchers observed a 13% lower risk of developing dementia among those who ate more high-fat cheese.
This value was theeven greater in the case of vascular dementia: the highest consumers of this type of cheese appeared to have a 29% lower risk of this subtype.
The cheese wasn’t the only dairy product demonstrating a protective effect. Anyone who consumed 20 grams or more of high fat cream per day had a 16% lower risk of dementia compared to those who did not consume cream.
And, according to the authors of the study, the decisive detail is the fat content: “Although eating more high-fat cheese and cream has been linked to a reduced risk of dementia, other dairy products and low-fat alternatives did not show the same effect”, emphasizes Sonestedt.
“These results thus suggest that, when it comes to the health of our brain, Not all dairy products are the same”, she emerges as a researcher.
In previous studies, a higher total consumption of dairy products had already been associated with a lower incidence of dementia in Asian and African populations; and some retrospective studies (unlike this, which is prospective) suggested that the same could occur in Europeans.
The problem is that other investigations did not find any connection. direct relationship between the consumption of these foods and the reduction of the risk of dementia. And, if some of the criticisms of this new study are correct, this new study could add up to this list.
After all, isn’t it that impressive?
It is important to clarify, first of all, that the study’s conclusions are not limited to “eat cheese and you will never have dementia”, especially because it is an observational study — which does not establish a cause-effect relationship.
Perhaps higher-fat dairy products do, in fact, have a protective effect — or perhaps, the preventive medicine specialist suggested David Katz“the real risk factor is worse health or chronic illness, and the choice for dairy products with less fat was a ‘self-defense’ strategy of people who knew they were at greater risk of adverse results.”
The truth is we don’t know.
Then there is the fact that the study was carried out entirely in Sweden. This has an impact, but perhaps not for the most obvious reason: Swedish cows are more likely to be grass fed than the North American ones, which translates into a milk with more omega-3 fatty acids.
There is plenty of evidence that these may have protective effects against the future risk of dementia, but in this context it means that Swedish cream and cheese may be, simply, more “brain friendly” than equivalents in other countries.
Furthermore, the way you consume cheese can have a bearing. “In Sweden and the USA, approximately the same amount of cheese is consumed per person, but the type is different,” explains Sonestedt to CNN last week.
“In Sweden, it is mainly about hard and fermented cheeseswhile in the USA a larger share is processed cheese or consumed in fast food contexts”, details the researcher
Of course also there may be something in the cheese that resists processing — calcium, or vitamins such as K or B12. But again, we don’t know. “We would like to see these results replicated in other countries and populations before drawing firm conclusions,” says Sonestedt.
O strangest problem in the studyhowever, is deeper. Even if all these limitations turn out to be irrelevant, the result itself may simply… not be that significant.
“The association found is at the threshold of statistical significance and they analyzed various foods; this It may just be due to chance”, told CNN Walter Willettprofessor of epidemiology and medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston. “I’m not going to run out and buy a block of cheese.”
One more careful reading of the results and methodology also suggests that the true factor associated with dementia risk may not be lower consumption of full-fat cheese, but rather chronic poor health.
In one that accompanied the study, Tian-Shin Yehphysician and nutritional epidemiologist at Taipei Medical University in Taiwan, warns that the new study fails to demonstrate an “intrinsically neuroprotective” effect of cheese and cream.
Yeh notes that the benefits of high-fat dairy products were most evident when they replaced foods of “clearly lower nutritional quality, such as processed meats or high-fat red meat.”
With this in mind, “it’s not so much that high-fat cheese is intrinsically neuroprotective, but rather that it is a less harmful option than red meat and processed meats,” Yeh wrote.
So in total? It’s an interesting first step — but don’t conclude that a block of cheese is a healthy snack just because of this study.
“Further research is needed to confirm the results of our study,” Sonestedt admitted in the statement, “and to further explore whether consumption of certain high-fat dairy products does, in fact, offer some level of protection to the brain.”
