Healthy Eating and Living a Healthy Lifestyle Just Got Easier
Cheese can be the downfall for many people trying to eat healthy and live a healthy lifestyle. People crave it, garnish with it, cook with it, etc. Many times that very cheese is not on someone’s meal plan because it has been historically understood to raise your bad cholesterol counts. To combat this, many have turned to the less desirable but still doable: reduced-fat cheese.
But stop the train! According to an article written by Hillary Eaton at livestrong.com she found that:
If you are one of the poor, conflicted souls who loves cheese just as much as you love healthy eating (guilty), it looks like the concession of eating reduced-fat cheese all these years might have actually been unnecessary. Sorry.
According to a recent study put out by the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, regular-fat cheese doesn’t actually increase your levels of LDL (aka bad) cholesterol. In a surprising turn of events, regular cheese actually has some positive side effects for cholesterol: It raises your levels of the good kind, HDL cholesterol, more than its reduced-fat counterpart.
The study followed 139 people divided into three groups over the course of 12 weeks. Group 1 was given 80 grams of regular cheese to incorporate into their daily diet, group 2 was given 80 grams of reduced-fat cheese, and poor group 3 had to go on without any cheese at all.
At the end of 12 weeks, there was no notable change in LDL cholesterol of the regular or reduced-fat cheese eaters.
There was also no notable increase in blood pressure, waist circumference, insulin or glucose levels in any of the groups. The only real change was in more elevated levels of HDL cholesterol, which helps to reduce the risk of heart disease, in the group that ate regular, good old-fashioned cheese.
Regular cheese: 1. Reduced-fat cheese: 0.
