There have been a couple of articles ranking the healthiness of different cheeses over the past week. An article in the Washington Post on 2nd September lists what the journalist perceives to be the most healthful cheeses and the reasons for those choices.
The article examines the benefits of unripened cheeses – cottage cheese, ricotta and goats cheeses – which are generally low in fat. And it also looks at the benefits of hard cheeses like cheddar and parmesan, which are higher in calcium and believed to be better for gut health. Blue cheeses are even higher in calcium, but are also higher in fat. The least healthy cheeses are listed as Brie and Camembert.
Last week a similar article on the Good Housekeeping website drew similar conclusions – it looked at the health benefits of soft unripened mozzarella, swiss cheese, parmesan, blue cheese, cottage cheese, ricotta cheese and goats cheese.
There’s some disagreement about whether low fat or regular cheese is more beneficial. The Washington post points to research on the benefit of full fat cheese on diabetes conducted in 2016. And it also references another study in the same year that indicated that full fat cheese actually helped reduce obesity in women
In addition, last month on this website, we looked at another piece of research that found that higher dairy intake actually reduced blood pressure in overweight middle-aged adults – you can read more about that research on our website by clicking here.
The article in good housekeeping gives some nice suggestions as to healthy accompaniments to serve with your cheeses and also some specific conditions that the various cheeses might be beneficial for. For example, did you know that cottage cheese contains selenium, a key antioxidant that helps to reduce risk of chronic inflammation?
You can see the original articles and research by clicking the links below:
From feta to American slices, a ranking of cheeses by healthfulness – Washington Post 2nd Sept 2019
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