Is Cheese Bad for You? The Evidence Says No – With Some Exceptions | Hacker News Reader

Is Cheese Bad for You? The Evidence Says No – With Some Exceptions

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12 pointstroydavis21 comments

Sugar is the crack that's killing us. Cheese is fats and proteins, which we handle very well. But the occasional fruit was our biggest source of sugar. Its rarity makes our bodies crave it like a drug, and today it's so cheap it's basically free.

Right on! Just see how it affects your skin (and beyond)... https://www.prevention.com/beauty/skin-care/a20428803/how-su... "In fact, collagen is the most prevalent protein in the body"

> For someone with a family history of heart disease or high cholesterol, fresh cheeses are best due to their low cholesterol content.

Dietary cholesterol doesn’t correlate strongly with blood cholesterol. You can eat a ton of it and your blood cholesterol won’t change one iota. That’s one of the misconceptions behind the vilification of eggs. The article disparages butter for the same reasons, but evidence is also showing butter was falsely accused.

There are too many pseudoscientists in the nutrition industry. You can’t trust anyone. The only thing I know for certain is to not overconsume. That’ll keep you healthy 90% of the time.

You rightly point out that nutrition is rife with pseudoscience (and obsolete scientific paradigms), and that you can't trust anyone. Here are some sources to add credibility to your claims. As one might expect, reality is more complex than your comment, as well as "cholesterol = bad":

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/what-should-you...

- The biggest influence on blood cholesterol level is the mix of fats and carbohydrates in your diet—not the amount of cholesterol you eat from food.

- For most people, the amount of cholesterol eaten has only a modest impact on the amount of cholesterol circulating in the blood. For some people, though, blood cholesterol levels rise and fall very strongly in relation to the amount of cholesterol eaten. For these “responders,” avoiding cholesterol-rich foods can have a substantial effect on blood cholesterol levels. Unfortunately, at this point there is no way other than by trial and error to identify responders from non-responders to dietary cholesterol.

https://www.cdc.gov/features/cholesterol-myths-facts/index.h...

- Myth: Eating foods with a lot of cholesterol will not make my cholesterol levels go up.

- Fact: It can be complicated. We know that foods with a lot of cholesterol usually also have a lot of saturated fat. Saturated fats can make your cholesterol numbers higher, so it’s best to choose foods that are lower in saturated fats. Foods made from animals, including red meat, butter, and cheese, have a lot of saturated fats.

Thanks for the reminder—-don’t accept what I said as fact, because we still don’t know. Your CDC link is a little behind the times, because it’s still claiming saturated fats are “the enemy.”

I actually read one of the sources behind your first link just before I posted my first comment to check my facts, and in the parts not quoted by your article it says that responders usually absorb proportional levels of HDL to LDL, making their blood cholesterol similarly neutral to non-responders.

I’m not going to tell someone who has heart disease to go eat a ton of eggs, but I will say that if you’re healthy you shouldn’t worry about it. Just don’t eat too much of anything.

I'm dubious of this article. After lookup up a couple of the (unlinked) references around apparent increase prostate cancer risk in men..

The conclusion of Dairy Products and Cancer Risk in a Northern Sweden Population[0] is the opposite "In conclusion, this study does not support any major adverse or beneficial effects of fermented milk, non-fermented milk, cheese, and butter in the diet from a cancer risk perspective"

The second (of three) references for this claim; Dairy products intake and cancer mortality risk: a meta-analysis of 11 population-based cohort studies[1] does mention elevated prostate cancer risk - "However, whole milk intake in men contributed to elevated prostate cancer mortality risk significantly". But this is about whole milk consumption (specifically, not cheese, yoghurt or butter)

We're living in a GPT3 world.. is this the product? The references don't support the claim (granted I only tested two of 21 references), and that last article-summary point "If you want to be deliberate in your cheese choices, consider sodium, calcium, calorie, and protein content" means absolutely nothing

[0]: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01635581.2019.1... [1]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27765039/

Kudos for also visiting the primary sources. Regarding this question:

> We're living in a GPT3 world.. is this the product?

No. I just found the author’s bio: https://nutrition.tufts.edu/profile/staff/julia-reedy

You may have questions about the post (and they may be valid), but clearly the author has experience reading and explaining nutrition research. Errors, if any, may simply be errors.

As the submitter, perhaps you know more than I.. but where did you find the link between that Tufts profile and the author? Given you've submitted insidetracker more than once, perhaps you're affiliated, in which case I'm curious why the profile isn't properly linked.

If you try and find her on insidetracker you just get a list of her articles, or a vague blurb that doesn't even mention her Tufts appointment

I Googled for the author’s name and degree acronym - basically, I copied the article’s byline. Her name and degree (“MNSP”) are unique enough to find other bio pages, including the one I linked to.

I’m not affiliated with the company or her.

evidence shows that cheese doesn’t deserve to be treated the same as meat or milk

Who in 2020 still thinks that meat, in and of itself, "promotes disease"?

Hardcore vegans. I say this as a hardcore vegan, but on a sort of different axis.

It's clearly associated with obesity, heart disease, etc.

Keeping animals too close together, like it's done in industrial-scale meat production, provides the right conditions for diseases to mutate to something very dangerous. The swine flu and Covid are good examples. The overuse of antibiotics might lead to a catastrophic spread of resistant bacteria in the future. Not all meat is produced this way, but most is.

Beef liver isn't.

Parmesan is a superfood. That is all I needed to read! http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20190127-italys-practically-...

> "Multiple meta-analyses show that, with the exception of prostate cancer, cheese does not increase cancer risk"

Well, that's a fairly dangerous exception, no?

the evidence is "50-80 grams/day is ok", per the article.

That is an actually tiny amount of cheese, if you can be bothered to measure it. So yeah, indulge if you want (I do!) but be aware it's still not a very healthy choice for daily consumption.

What evidence do we have of it not being healthy for daily consumption?

As a French, that seems a very reasonable amount to me. The article says this amount covers one or two servings, and it seems about right although I don't have a balance at hand to check it ;) Use small helpings, of tasty cheese.

One point not covered here is that the fat in cheese, although unhealthy animal fats, are very effective at stopping hunger. I noticed that if I take cheese for lunch, I'm not hungry at all until diner. Without, I may feel a need to stack late in the afternoon. And I wouldn't be surprised if this snacking were much worse than the small portion of cheese. So it's an indirect way for cheese to help keep a balancing diet: as a help to fight (very bad) snacking.

Also, it's best to eat cheese for lunch, where you have the whole day to "burn" it, and skip it for diner. At least that's the recommendation past a certain age, where you need to be more careful about your waistline...

Your comment shows the difference between American and French diet habits. A French person having cheese for lunch means a 50gr slice of Roquefort with some bread. An American having cheese for lunch is two slices of pizza with a giant Coke. Then Americans are confused why the French can eat all those fatty foods and not gain as much weight.

Yes, and it reminds me of another effect: I don't have the reference at hand, but I read about a study showing that to "feel full" you need a lower intake of strong taste food versus bland food. Then the Roquefort definitely beats the rather bland pizza cheese, no contest ;). The "smelly French cheese" is a well known joke, but it may actually help getting full and stopping eating with a lower calories intake than blander food.

Oh yea, love Roquefort. I remember it was quite difficult to get where I lived in the US maybe 10 years ago and then suddenly it started appearing at normal supermarkets.

I've been told unpasteurized cheese is hard to get in the US still and is somehow tastier. Haven't had a chance to confirm.

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