Don’t beat yourself up if you do some serious damage on a cheese plate during holiday festivities this year: You just may do your future self a favor.
A new study has found that eating nearly 2 ounces or more of high-fat cheese each day has been associated with a 16% lower risk of dementia, according to the study published this week in Neurology. Lest you think this is some sort of propaganda by Big Cheese, the study followed nearly 28,000 adults in Malmö, Sweden for roughly 25 years.
The study’s findings indicate that Swedes who ate more cheese with a fat content exceeding 20%—which includes many varieties of cheddar, gouda, and blue cheese, among others—had a lower risk of all-cause dementia. The researchers didn’t find a similar link with other high-fat dairy products and noted that “further confirmation of these findings in diverse populations is warranted.”
While the amount of cheese in question—equivalent to less than a handful of diced cubes—may not seem significant, scientists are keen to identify even something small that could raise or lower the risk of dementia. More than 6 million Americans are currently living with dementia, and 42% of Americans over the age of 55 could eventually develop such declines in mental abilities, according to figures from the National Institutes of Health.
QUESTIONING THE FINDINGS
It might be tempting to give yourself permission to go wild on full-fat cheese “for your brain,” though your waistline could pay the price. The study’s authors said their findings require “caution in interpretation,” something that other experts were quick to do.
The researchers only captured the dietary habits of participants at one point in 1991 and didn’t follow up with the majority of them over the course of the next 25 years. This sort of approach raises questions about the robustness of the study’s conclusions, Dr. Tian-Shin Yeh, a physician and nutritional epidemiologist at Taipei Medical University in Taiwan, wrote in an editorial published alongside the study.
What’s more, the benefits of eating high-fat cheeses were most evident when participants swapped cheese for other foods, like processed or high-fat red meat, which might just reveal the difference of better options, according to Yeh. “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 wrote.
BENEFITS OF CHEESE
The findings may not apply to somewhere like the U.S., where much of our cheese is processed, according to Emily Sonestedt, who led the new study and is a senior lecturer and associate professor of nutrition at Lund University in Sweden, Still, it’s possible that there are benefits from certain healthful components of cheese, like vitamins K or B12, or minerals like calcium, she told The New York Times.
As with any of these sorts of studies, it’s also important for people to remember that correlation doesn’t imply causation—something Sonestedt reinforced. “This does not prove that cheese prevents dementia, but it does challenge the idea that all high-fat dairy is bad for the brain,” Sonestedt said in an email to CNN.
HIGH-FAT FOODS IN FOCUS
Some people don’t need purported brain benefits to convince them to eat foods high in saturated fats. These foods have been embraced in the keto diet, among others, in recent years, despite long-standing nutrition guidelines that recommend people limit their consumption of foods high in saturated fats because of the evidence that they raise LDL cholesterol levels, along with the risk of heart attack or stroke.
But those guidelines are likely to see a shake-up in 2026 as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the U.S. secretary for health and human services, has said that the next edition of the federal dietary guidelines will instead “stress the need to eat” saturated fats, dairy, fresh meat, and vegetables.
And even if the results of this study are appealing to cheese lovers, the quirks of how the research was conducted mean that some experts aren’t exactly buying the results.
NOT BUYING IT
In fact, because the link between cheese consumption and dementia risk was “at the margin of statistical significance,” it could be due to just chance, notes 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 to CNN.