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Fitness & Health

22nd Sep 2016

Study finds that cheese not only tastes delicious, it can be good for you too

Conor Heneghan

Portlaoise

The study didn’t actually prove that cheese tastes delicious, but we already knew that.

We didn’t need to be told that it tastes great when lathered over a pizza, splattered over curry chips, or even just on its own when there’s nothing else to eat.

homercheese

Whatever cheese guilts you might have felt while stuffing yourself full of cheesy goodness might be eased in future following a very welcome study by researchers at the University of Copenhagen, published in the American Journal of Nutrition recently.

Over 12 weeks, 139 lucky adults took part in a study that divided them up into three separate groups in an effort to examine the negative effect of regular, high fat cheese, which contains a large amount of saturated fats.

The first group ate 80g of regular, high-fat cheese per day, the second group ate 80g of low-fat cheese and the third group didn’t eat any cheese at all, eating 90g of bread and jam instead.

At the end of the 12 weeks, it was discovered that eating the high-fat cheese had no effect on the first group’s ‘bad’ LDL (low-density lipoprotein) cholesterol, their waist size, or their blood pressure; in fact, there was an increase in their levels of ‘good’ HDL (high-density lipoprotein) during the 12-week period.

80g isn’t exactly a large amount of cheese – you’d get far more in a pizza, for example – so it’s not a sudden excuse to start bingeing or anything, but it may come as a slight relief to those of you who can’t get enough of the stuff.

We’re just going to leave this here…

cheesesandwich

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