By Sandee LaMotte, CNN
(CNN) — High-fat cheese and cream may slightly protect the brain from dementia, according to a new observational study that followed nearly 28,000 people in Malmö, Sweden, for up to 25 years.
High-fat cheeses such as cheddar, Brie and Gouda have more than 20% saturated fat, according to the research.
Outside experts CNN spoke to, however, say the report fails to provide a strong case for eating more full-fat dairy.
“Their finding for cheese was at the margin of statistical significance and they looked at multiple foods, so this might be just due to chance,” said leading nutrition researcher Dr. Walter Willett, professor of epidemiology and nutrition at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston.
“I’m not running out to buy a block of cheese,” Willett said in an email.
A significant limitation of the study is that it captured dietary habits at only one point — the start of the study in 1991 — and did not follow up with the majority of participants over the next 25 years. Instead, the authors ran an analysis on a subset of the group after the first five years to see whether their diets had changed.
“However, under this approach, the associations for both high-fat cheese and cream became nonsignificant, raising questions about the robustness of their conclusions,” wrote Dr. Tian-Shin Yeh in an editorial published along with the study.
Yeh is an associate professor and attending physician in the college of medicine at Taipei Medical University in Taiwan.
In addition, Yeh wrote, the benefits of high-fat cheese were most evident when cheese replaced foods of “clearly lower nutritional quality, such as processed or high-fat red meat.”
“It is not so much that high-fat cheese is inherently neuroprotective, but rather that it is a less harmful choice than red and processed meats,” she added.
A small benefit for the brain
The study, published Wednesday in the journal Neurology, found people who ate 50 grams (about 2 ounces) or more of high-fat cheese daily had a 13% lower risk of dementia than those eating less than 15 grams (0.5 ounce).
Those who consumed 20 grams (0.7 ounce) or more of high-fat cream each day also had a 16% lower risk of dementia than those who consumed none. That amount is about 1.4 tablespoons of heavy whipping cream, the study said.
“Our research suggests that people who ate more high-fat cheese had a slightly lower risk of developing dementia later in life,” said senior study author Emily Sonestedt, a senior lecturer and associate professor of nutrition at Lund University in Sweden.
“This does not prove that cheese prevents dementia, but it does challenge the idea that all high-fat dairy is bad for the brain,” she said in an email.
The finding may delight some in the Make America Healthy Again, or MAHA, movement who believe saturated fats are healthy. US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promotes butter and beef tallow, both of which have been shown in numerous studies to be bad for health.
However, the study found no benefit for the brain from butter, milks or fermented milks such as kefir, buttermilk and yogurt, or low-fat dairy products.
In fact, the data on low-fat dairy was quite telling, said Dr. David Katz, a specialist in preventive and lifestyle medicine who founded the nonprofit Read more