I love cheese - and I eat a lot of pizza. Can you escape the fat by blotting it up on your pizza? I expect that most of the butterfat oozes out when the cheese is browned-is this the solution?
Is your lead intentionally misleading? I was just going to say it’s not the food, in most cases, it’s the amount of it you eat.
What?
The US is fat because, in an attempt to avoid eating fat, we all started eating more breads and sugars. We were wrong. You’re better off to get a thin crust pizza than to blot your cheese.
Ralph doesn’t make it clear, but I think he’s referring to this article from the New York Times, which discusses how a Department of Agriculture program promotes cheese consumption while other programs within the department advise people to avoid saturated fat.
He may be assuming we’ve all seen this, which goes into more detail:
ETA: Dewey beat me to it.
I don’t see anything so striking about the paradox the Times tries to set up. The DOA has always had a mission of promoting U.S. farm industry, which has all kinds of potentially perverse and contradictory outcomes and probably always will as long as farm states have a disproportionate influence in the Senate. This is the same agency that spends billions either buying up unneeded commodities or paying farmers not to grow them.
This is old news, too. How long has the government been shoveling surplus butter and cheese through welfare and school lunch programs? And God knows corn is the darling of the U.S. gov’t even when we know that much of it is destined to end up in HFCS (putting aside whether HFCS is worse than sucrose, it has to find a home somewhere, and certainly the FDA et al. are way down on sweetened sodas, etc.).
There’s also an element of left-hand/right-hand. It’s not always the same agencies or divisions thereof that are making ag policy and health advice policy.
And . . . the messages aren’t necessarily inconsistent. If people are (assuming this is a good thing) keeping overall fats and calories down, but splurging occasionally on a couple slices of Domino’s Wisconsin Six Cheese pizza, there’s a balance point where Dominos and health policy can both be winners.
I’m not even going to get into the extent to which the food pyramid and other “official” federal health advice is based on by-no-means-settled science or “science” such as the Lipid Hypothesis. Suffice to say though that I know from other threads that there are many on this board like me who load up on cheese, butter, and other sat fats and have good lipid profiles and overall health.
Well, the article points out that the DoA still promotes dairy consumption with this statement, “clinical studies show that people on a reduced-calorie diet who consume three servings of milk, cheese or yogurt each day can lose significantly more weight and more body fat than those who just cut calories,” even though this conclusion is unsupported by other researchers.
I don’t know why they couldn’t invent good tasting, useable low-fat cheese. They did it with milk and cottage cheese. There are reduced fat bricks of something there in the cheese case, but it’s hit or miss. Maybe the American public would take one bite and go “phooey” so it’s not worth the effort to de-fat cheese…
I would rather have the full fat good tasting stuff and just restrict my use to a normal portion. Although I do agree that the skim milk cottage cheese is decent. I can’t choke down skim milk though, that stuff tastes like ass.
Both milk and cottage cheese contain significant amounts of whey, which has only trace fat. Almost by definition, firmer cheeses get made firm by pressing/expelling the whey, thus inevitably upping the comparative fat content. AFAIK, to make a semi-hard or hard cheese that would have similar texture to its full fat counterpart be lower-fat, you’d need to put some filler or substitute for the fat. That changes the flavor profile and as the article notes, not for the better in most cases.
Like many historic food preservation inventions, cheesemaking does a very good job of concentrating a lot of nutrients/energy in a stable, relatively compact form. That hardly strikes me as a problem as long as people figure out what combination of overall energy intake, and what macronutrient ratios, work to keep them healthy. I just am not willing to believe that “less cheese” is going to be the blanket answer, for all people in every circumstance, as the cheese-haters in the article imply.
You are so right. Cheese is so good because of the fat. Low fat cheese is a pale imitation. There are very few low fat cheeses I’ll eat, it’s not worth it to me. I’d rather just eat less of the regular cheese