Effect of cheese intake on cardiovascular diseases and cardiovascular biomarkers | Hacker News Reader

Effect of cheese intake on cardiovascular diseases and cardiovascular biomarkers

mdpi.com

34 pointsvoisin41 comments

David Sinclair wrote in "Lifespan"[1] that scientists were baffled by the longevity of people in France. They investigated regions all around the world where it is more common for people to be centenarians (passing 3-digits age) or supercentenarians (110 years of age).

Okinawa? Green and yellow veggies, seaweed, tea, mushrooms. Overall anti-inflammatory and antioxidant-rich diet could explain extended longevity.

South Korea? Rice, noodles, tofu, fish, meat and veggies. A lot of fermentation.

Barbados? Fish or meat with veggies. Dishes with multiple salads.

Portugal? Fish, pastries, veggies and some wine.

France? Cheese and wine. Fat and alcohol. Some fish and veggies, too, but with a lot of cheese and wine.

If I remember correctly, France kind of screwed up their idea of "healthy diet is crucial to longevity" as they considered high cheese intake to be far from healthy dietary habit.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifespan:_Why_We_Age_%E2%80%93...

> France kind of screwed up their idea of "healthy diet is crucial to longevity"

Actually, no; it screwed with the preconceived notion that fat and "fatty foods" are automatically unhealthy.

France isn't the outlier. In those "pockets" of longevity you've mentioned there actually is a common thread: moderate to little consumption of refined carbohydrates.

This is what dietary science got all wrong since the 50s. The problem isn't butter, it's bread with butter. It's not cheese, it's pasta with cheese.

Carbohydrates and fats together are bad for you. But guess what, you should eliminate carbs first, not fat. Fat is good, it's energy, it's essential for hormones. Carbs, especially simple or refined ones, are just fuel that either you burn NOW or it's quickly stored during period of famines. With an added feedback loop of wanting to consume more to be better prepared for the winter. Fructose being obesogenic is by design.

We know this now, yet we keep hearing the same bullshit around fat is bad, eat another bread roll from pop sci rags. My local shop only sells low fat yogurt and skinless chicken thighs.

But the French love bread. It's served with every meal. They even nationally legislate it's price.

Explain Italian centenarians and their massive pasta consumption in that case. Or Portuguese centenarians and our massive consumption of bread and rice.

You could just as well point the blame to refined vegetable oils. There's good evidence to suggest that excess linoleic acid is tremendously harmful to all our tissues. Is all fat the same?

There's no point in blaming a single macronutrient. The only truly useful simplifications you can make that apply to the general population are that:

A) natural foods are generally better than process foods B) moving around all day is generally better than sitting still C) starting out with the right genes is a pretty good call D) keeping yourself lean until old age (and then a little fatter) is another pretty good call.

I'm originally from Italy. The people in Southern Italy that consume massive amounts of pasta have the typical "beer belly" you might have seen on US television. What's absent in Southern Europe in my experience is the big flabby type of obesity. But beer belly is terrible, it means most fat is visceral.

A regular Italian diet isn't pasta 3 meals a day, but meat, vegetables, salami, cheese and some pasta and bread. The consumption of salami and cheeses isn't much different than France. In my youth I had both more frequently than spaghetti, and if I did, portions were moderate, and food generally unprocessed. We don't buy macaroni in a can.

I do agree on refined and vegetable oils being terrible. I personally avoid any vegetable oil which isn't pressed from fruit pulp, such as olive, avocado or coconut, but prefer animal fats generally. Seed oils are perhaps the worst thing one can ingest.

"Massive" was hyperbolic from me but it seems like we agree that reducing processed foods from american-level consumption down to something reasonable does a lot more for people than striving to hit zero. That was the point I was clumsily trying to make.

I personally reduced my intake of refined carbs and oils as well, but a baguette here and there is well worth the tradeoff and can even be beneficial.

What about the studies that seem to show a benefit from replacing animal fats with whole grains?

Whole grain as I understand it is somewhat modern in most places and don't seem to have been widely available till very recently, now just about every grain product has a whole grain version.

There's a few fats that seem to be healthy, but most people don't need any extra energy.

Also in common - poor archiving of birth records

What if it's all just bad data and we can't use Okinawa etc because the data is listing very old people who simply aren't there anymore?

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-11258071

This is very exciting! (Speaking as a good customer of Trader Joe's "Grana Padano" Parmesano Reggiano and Kerrygold cheddar.)

But the list of illnesses cheese seems to protect against appears to match complications from fatty-liver disease, AKA metabolic syndrome, which is apparently caused by excess ingestion of fructose and/or alcohol, and prevalent in the UK and all its former colonies. It is as if the cheese is protecting people against absorption of dietary fructose. Or alcohol?

As I understand it, intestinal bacteria are well equipped to neutralize fructose, provided absorption is delayed long enough to give them a crack at it. How cheese would aid this is a mystery.

So you know, Grana Padano isn't a kind of Parmigiano-Reggiano, it's a similar but different kind of cheese.

A quick Google shows that Trader joes markets it as "Grana Padano Parmesan" so I don't blame you for the confusion.

If you really enjoy it, I'd recommend trying to get your hands on DOP Parmigiano-Reggiano and Grana Padano and comparing the two to taste the difference.

IMO, Parmigiano-Reggiano is absolutely the best cheese to put on top of things, but I'm in Europe where it costs next to nothing, even DOP.

You get them in almost all aromatic qualities in France and Italy. Touched a pinch of one of the strongest hard cheeses I could find there. Tasted extremely strong but awesome. Still, I scrubbed, showered and bathed but it did not matter. My hand smelled of cheese for two days straight. And this was a hard cheese, imagine what its softer brothers could do.

The way I had understood it was that regular Reggiano was aged 2 years, Grana Padano 3, and Stravecchio 4. It appears I have been mistaken.

Checking, it says 18 months...

The difference isn't just age.

Grana Padano and Parmigiano-Reggiano are different cheeses, just like Camembert and Brie are different cheeses. Since they're both PDO, you can read the detailed requirements [0,1]. The differences are primarily the regions where they're produced and how the milk is processed.

Stravecchio is just an adjective that means "old" or "mature" [2] and can be applied to any kind of cheese, wine, or whatever.

[0]: https://www.parmigianoreggiano.com/static/3bb2ed0dbce70d6851...

[1]: https://www.granapadano.it/public/file/Production-Specificat...

[2]: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/italian-english/...

I am trying to find how they define "cheese" in this study and I can't seem to find it. They talk about high saturated fat content but that's not a defining feature of cheese. For example, cottage cheese can have low to no fat and it's still "cheese". The cheddar slices they put on hamburgers is mostly vegetable oil, but that too is considered cheese.

Possibly relevant: they mention "suggestive evidence" of a positive association between cheese intake and high-density lipoprotein. As it happens, I'm an avid cheese eater (especially anything in the gouda family) and also supplement with tyrosine (those crystals you find in some aged cheeses). And I have what my doctor described as "freakishly high" HDL levels, in what is otherwise a pretty boring set of blood-test numbers and a pretty typical (i.e. crappy) American diet. It really kind of stands out, begging explanation. Maybe it's nothing, or maybe there's something to this cheese/HDL thing.

The better prognosis associated with cheese intake may be explained by lower body mass index (BMI; effect estimate = −0.58; 95% CI, from −0.88 to −0.27; p = 0.0002), waist circumference (effect estimate = −0.49; 95% CI, from −0.76 to −0.23; p = 0.0003), triglycerides (effect estimate = −0.33; 95% CI, from −0.50 to −0.17; p = 4.91 × 10−5), and fasting glucose (effect estimate = −0.20; 95% CI, from −0.33 to −0.07; p = 0.0003).

I will toss out the idea that cheese is a source of good quality salt as well, fwiw.

Some of the "cheese" sold in the US is "cheese product", which is non-cheese.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Processed_cheese

"Processed cheese is a food product made from cheese and unfermented dairy ingredients"

"The FDA does not maintain a standard of identity for either "pasteurized prepared cheese product", a designation which particularly appears on many Kraft products, or "pasteurized process cheese product", a designation which appears particularly on many American store- and generic-branded singles. Products labeled as such may use milk protein concentrate (MPC) in the formulation, which is not listed in the permitted optional dairy ingredients. The desire to use inexpensive imported milk protein concentrate is noted as motivation for the introduction of these and similar terms, and for the relabeling of some products."

"After an FDA Warning Letter protesting Kraft's use of MPC in late 2002,some varieties of Kraft Singles formerly labeled "pasteurized process cheese food" became "pasteurized prepared cheese product", Velveeta was relabeled from "pasteurized process cheese spread" to "pasteurized prepared cheese product", and Easy Cheese from "pasteurized process cheese spread" to "pasteurized cheese snack"."

Or;

"What Is American Cheese? Well, as you might have guessed, it's not actually cheese—at least, not legally. The FDA calls it “pasteurized processed American cheese food.” In order for a food product to be a true “cheese,” it has to be more than half cheese, which is technically pressed curds of milk."

https://www.tasteofhome.com/article/what-is-american-cheese-...

The simpler explanation is that cheese is expensive so people who eat it likely have better health anyways due to their wealth

> that cheese is expensive

Not in countries that produce a lot of cheese.

But cheese is probably healthy anyway. It's milk minus the sugars.

Not if you smoke cigarettes and eat cheese with bread(like pizza). I feel such studies are dubious for specific people. Instead understanding of kinetics of мetabolic system probably better way forward.

That I don't really remember statistics of science experiments.

> ...understanding of kinetics of мetabolic system probably better way forward.

Completely agree.

> мetabolic

   metabolic

What keyboard layout are you using? =]

or layout(s), more likely!

Cheese isn't necessarily expensive though. Regular block cheese is quite cheap and then you have things like cottage cheese too that are very affordable. The study doesn't say they only look at fancy cheeses.

I just bought some cheese: 1pound of sharp cheddar for USD 3.65, listed as 1760 calories. Not very expensive.

That's more than most meats and vegetables, definitely on the higher side of groceries. Too expensive to eat a whole bunch with every meal.

$4 for a day's worth of calories? How much do you spend on food every day?

What meat are you buying for $3.65 a pound?

That's more expensive than chicken, most pork, ground beef, turkey... Obviously, prices depend on location and where you shop, so they may be different, but this has been my experience across a few states (all in the midwest or southwest, though, so my food is probably cheaper comparatively if you're a coastie).

Yes, I'm coastal for now and meats are more expensive than basic cheeses, may be reflected in how I shop.

Good cheeses, more expensive than meats, but oh boy are they tasty. A nice mimolette or tomme...

How many calories in a pound of chicken, pork, or beef?

Cheese is a common inexpensive staple in Europe. You’re overpaying for cheese.

Or buying the wrong cheese.

Some cheese can be quite spendy.

Or both, overpaying for crap. But this is America, and only the people who travel outside of it learn how food and other things are treated better elsewhere.

One should show to Asians how much some of these American versions of tofu are being sold at high end supermarkets like whole foods.

Tofu is a poor mans food (a bit like Asian milk free version of cheese), but companies have repackaged it to Americans as fancy.

What could be fancier than blocks of fermented soy that generally all taste the same (not that much taste is there)?

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