By Matthew Diebel
Pass the cheese, please.
And the cream and that carton of full-fat yogurt and a big glass of non-skimmed milk.
And, yes, eat it to your heart’s content.
That’s the finding of an international team that analyzed 29 studies and found that dairy products — even high-fat ones — does not increase the risk of heart attacks and strokes.
The study, published in the European Journal of Epidemiology, concluded that consumption of the creamy comestibles had a “neutral” effect on our health, according to a report in the United Kingdom’s Guardian newspaper.
One of the researchers, Ian Givens, a professor of nutrition at England’s Reading University, told the paper that “there’s quite a widespread but mistaken belief among the public that dairy products in general can be bad for you, but that’s a misconception. While it is a widely held belief, our research shows that that’s wrong.”
“There’s been a lot of publicity over the last five to 10 years about how saturated fats increase the risk of cardiovascular disease and a belief has grown up that they must increase the risk, but they don’t.”
Givens and others from Reading, Copenhagen University in Denmark and Wageningen University in the Netherlands looked at studies involving 938,465 people from around the world undertaken over the last 35 years, the Guardian reported.