Does high-fat dairy prevent dementia? Not so fast, experts say

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 True Health Initiative, a global coalition of experts dedicated to evidence-based lifestyle medicine. He was not involved with the study.

“The group consuming lower-fat dairy had a considerably higher burden of health impairments at baseline — including diabetes, dyslipidemia, and coronary disease among others,” said Katz in an email.

“This, in turn, suggests that the real risk factor for dementia is worse health/chronic disease, and that the turn to lower-fat dairy may have been a ‘self-defense’ strategy among those who knew themselves to be at elevated risk for adverse health outcomes.”

The role of omega-3 fatty acids

Another reason the study is not representative is that dairy cows in Sweden are more likely to be grass-fed than cows in the United States, said neurologist Dr. Richard Isaacson, director of research on Alzheimer’s at the Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases in Florida.

Grass-fed cows are more likely to produce milk, cream and cheese with more omega-3 fatty acids

“Omega-three fatty acids, in my opinion, are brain healthy,” said Isaacson, who was not involved in the study. “However, they’re mostly brain healthy in people who have the APOE4 variant, a gene which makes it more likely to develop Alzheimer’s.

“This study found the opposite — people without the APOE4 gene were more protected. These are confusing findings, and while I’m intrigued, I’m certainly not going to tell people to eat high-fat cheese to prevent Alzheimer’s.”

Sonestedt also recognized the findings may not be generalizable to people in the US and other Westernized countries.

“People in Sweden and the U.S. eat roughly the same amount of cheese per person, but the type is different,” Sonestedt said. “In Sweden it is mostly hard, fermented cheeses, while in the U.S. a larger share is processed cheese or cheese eaten in fast-food contexts.

“We would like to see our findings replicated in more countries and populations before drawing firm conclusions,” she added.

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