Please increase cheese to ease heart disease

Study shows daily cheese consumption can be healthy

A nibble of cheese a day keeps heart disease away.

A recent analysis of more than 200,000 people showed that those who ate a little bit of cheese every day were less likely to develop heart disease than those who rarely or never ate it. Researchers from China and the Netherlands examined data from 15 previous studies where most of the participants were tracked for at least 10 years.

Overall, those who ate more cheese had a 14 percent lower risk of developing heart disease and were 10 percent less likely to have a stroke than their cheese-averse peers. But experts warn that the study does not advocate eating enormous quantities of cheese. People who seemed to have health benefits from cheese ate about 40 grams a day or, a square the size of a matchbook.

“This is not the same as eating a big slice of cheesy pizza every day,” director of aortic surgery at Ichan School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Medical Center, Dr. Allan Stewart, who was not involved in the study, told Time. “(But the findings were) certainly different from what people might expect.”

The dairy product contains healthful ingredients like calcium, protein and probiotics, said the authors of a new study published in the European Journal of Nutrition. But cheese contains high levels of saturated fat that can cause high cholesterol and an increased risk of heart disease.