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One has long suspected that nutritional and dietary
guidelines are less than reliable. Once upon a time everyone thought that
eating high cholesterol foods was going to give you heart disease. Thus,
well-meaning souls replaced eggs and burgers with grass and twigs.
Evidently, the human organism reacts badly to imperious
efforts to force it to follow the dictates of behavioral economists and other
so-called experts. We saw what happened in public schools when Michelle Obama
decreed that children replace pizza and fries with lettuce and carrots. The
children went hungry and started skipping school to gorge themselves on
Whoppers.
Anyway, new research is undoing the damage done by prior
nutritional gurus. Recently, a Chinese study discovered (or claimed) that eating
cheese was not only not bad for you. It was good for you. They drew this
conclusion from studying Frenchmen and Frenchwomen. How did it happen that they
ate cheese and had lower incidence of heart disease? Was it all about the red
wine or was it the whining?
The Daily Mail has the story:
Cheese
has a reputation for being bad for you – but research suggests eating it every
day could in fact reduce your chances of developing heart disease.
Consuming
a matchbox size amount – one-and-a-half ounces or 40g – daily can slash the
risk by 14 per cent.
This
same portion size could lower the risk of a stroke by 10 per cent, found
the Chinese study.
Researchers
are keen to understand the so-called 'French paradox', a perplexing phenomenon
in which French people, who tend to have diets rich in cholesterol and
saturated fat, somehow have low rates of heart disease.
Soochow
University has now found that cheese raises levels of so-called 'good'
cholesterol while reducing levels of 'bad' cholesterol.
Although
cheese contains high levels of saturated fat – linked to bad heart health – the
calcium in the food means less of that fat is absorbed by the body, it was
discovered.
Additionally, it also contains an acid that can help prevent clogging of the
arteries.
Who
knew?
4 comments:
It is shocking that moochelle attempted to change hundreds of thousands of years of human dietary evolution with carrots replacing ancient hominid preference for colas and pizza. Why would anyone think that eating handfuls of sugar is a bad idea?
What a friend we have in cheeses!
S: "Was it all about the red wine or was it the whining?"
My money's on Red whining; see Piketty, Thomas.
It's not just the cheese that was vilified - red meat and fat in general. The newer studies have been around for some time but it seems as though it takes time for the general public and whoever it is who somehow informs them to get that information and believe it.
Here's an article about nutrition and heart health from 2002.www.nytimes.com/2002/07/07/magazine/what-if-it-s-all-… Gary Taubes wrote it and so many people considered it be a heresy but after many years of slowly putting out the new information the facts he writes about have been recognized. http://nymag.com/vindicated/2016/11/how-a-nutrition-heretic-overcame-a-big-fat-public-shaming.html
What strikes me though is that in another thirty years we may suddenly realize ( once again ...) that we got it wrong! At least we're trying and if we're trying to improve our eating the chances are good that we're going to be doing something good.
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