For decades, nutritional guides and specific diets focused on ensuring brain health, such as the famous MIND diet, have had a common enemy: saturated fats of dairy origin. However, science has now turned the wheel to show us that we were completely wrong.
New evidence. A new and exhaustive study published in the journal Neurology You just turned this belief upside down. After following almost 28,000 people for a quarter of a century, researchers at Lund University have found a surprising association: regular consumption of high-fat cheese and cream not only does not increase the risk of dementia, but appears to significantly reduce it.
The Swedish diet. The researchers conducted a median follow-up of 25 years until 2020, cross-referencing dietary data with the Swedish National Patient Registry. The result was that during this type, 3,208 cases of dementia were identified, and from then on we began to see what these people ate.
In this case, those who consumed 50 grams or more of high-fat cheese per day showed a reduced risk of dementia of between 13% and 19% compared to those who did not consume it. Furthermore, consumption of high-fat cream was associated with a 16% reduction in the risk of having full-blown dementia.
But there is more. The most curious thing about the finding was the specificity, since similar benefits were not found in low-fat dairy products, nor in regular milk or butter. In this way, you can see that there is something specific in the nutritional matrix of cheese and fermented cream that plays in favor of our brain.
Why this cheese. Emily Sonestedt, co-author of the study, was surprised by the results, although she points out that they have biological logic. While traditional diets limit cheese due to its calorie and saturated fat content, this food is rich in medium chain fatty acids, vitamin K2, calcium and high quality proteins.
In addition to all this, the fact that it is a fermented food can positively influence the intestinal microbiota, and we increasingly know more about the direct connection between the intestine and the brain. In this way, maintaining a good microbiota again indicates that it guarantees us having better brain health.
You have to be cautious. Before running to the supermarket to Buy all the types of cheese on the shelves, it is necessary to put on the usual handbrake in science, since we are talking about an observational study. This means that science points to two things happening at the same time, but it does not prove 100% that one causes the other.
And in this case, lifestyle may be interfering, such as the fact that people who eat cheese in Sweden have other lifestyle habits such as greater physical activity that protect them, although the researchers tried to adjust the variables.
The verdict. The idea that “all saturated fat is bad for the brain” is losing steam in the face of evidence that certain complex foods, such as aged cheese or cream, have properties that go beyond their basic nutritional label. As is often the case in nutrition, the key does not seem to be eliminating food groups, but rather understanding the quality and source of what we eat.
Images | Aliona Gumeniuk Robina Weermeijer
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