Doctors and nutritionists have long recommended avoiding all animal fats to trim cholesterol, but Danish researchers say cheese may not be so bad, and probably shouldn’t be placed in the same category as butter.
According to their study, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, people who ate daily servings of cheese for six-week intervals had lower LDL cholesterol, the so-called “bad” cholesterol, than when they ate a comparable amount of butter.
The cheese eaters also did not have higher LDL during the experiment than when they ate a normal diet.
“Cheese lowers LDL cholesterol when compared with butter intake of equal fat content and does not increase LDL cholesterol compared with a habitual diet,” wrote Julie Hjerpsted and her colleagues, from the University of Copenhagen.