Eat More Cheese!

And now you have it! Scientific proof that eating cheese is good for you.  Here is an article in Time Magazine titled: Here’s Your New Science-Backed Reason to Eat More Cheese, by Mandy Oaklander dated April 13, 2015 that reveals all.

 

Did you really think otherwise?  The average French person is thin and eats 57 pounds of it a year! So what are you waiting for?  Go to your local cheesemonger and buy cheese!

Cheese, Fat and Sodium

An interesting article in the NYTimes, Ask to Get Slim, Cheese Resists, by Harry Fountain - The U.S. Cheese Industry Works to Reduce Sodium and Fat.  All about how America is trying to make cheese with less fat and less salt and still have something that approximates cheese. Not certain there is a point to this since cheese derived its character from the milk fat and salt acts as a preservative and flavour enhancer.

Fighting that Fat! Cheese on the front line?

The other day I was surfing the web regarding weight  because in my role as a fromologue, people constantly insist that cheese is fattening and bad for you. Since I eat a vast quantity of the stuff and other dairy products, don't do that much exercise except if you consider walking to the métro in Paris, have pretty low cholesteral and am not considered even vaguely fat, I am always looking for scientific evidence to fortify my argruments as well as my personal evidence to the contrary. 

 

So imagine my glee when I stumbled across this article regarding a study from 2004 which indicates that honest to goodness real, unadulterated diary products should not be considered necessarily fattening and, to the contrary, possess a lot of benefits especially for those who are obese. According to the articles I read following the subject, "getting enough calcium in your diet seems to stimulates the body to burn more fat and reduces the amount of new fat the body makes" per Dr. Michael Zemel, a professor of nutrition at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and a pioneer in this emerging area of research on the relationship between calcium and weight management.

Whoa! Gotta love that, but what is going on here? Apparently, researchers found overweight people who consumed 3 servings a day of calcium-rich dairy lost more belly fat than those who followed a similar diet with less of the dairy servings. To further emphasize the point, they found that calcium supplements didn't work as well the real deal! According to the good doctor, a diet low in calcium appears to stimulate the production of fat-producing enzymes and decreases the activity of enzymes that break down fat. "The moral of the calcium story is to not dump dairy when you're dieting...as it can help make your weight lost efforts easier," Zemel said.  

A note of caution however as this does not give people the license to go wild and over-indulge in dairy products hoping to generate weight loss. Helas! As we have always known, there is no gain (or loss in this case!) without some pain. In otherwords, you still have to burn more calories than you take in; eating properly and doing some exercise on top of that doesn't do any harm either. Still it's nice to know that eating all those diary products, in my case my cheese addiction, isn't killing me and could actually be helping keep those love handles under control!  Here's a link to one of the articles.