- Conflict of interest Dairy Council funded study of only 15 people concludes that cheese is good for your heart.
- Study excludes scientific logic of ‘correlation does not imply causation’.
Everyone is being told to spit out whatever their currently eating and to shove their faces full of brie, because dairy cheese is good for your heart according to a recent study by a group of Danish scientists.
The scientists wanted to investigate the so-called ‘French Paradox’ where the French don’t seem to suffer from cardiovascular disease as much as their high saturated fat, high cholesterol diets would suggest. However, there actually isn’t a ‘French Paradox’ at all. French authorities collect health statistics differently to other countries—French Pathologists don’t write down heart disease when someone dies of a heart attack, but rather claim old age, and so on.
The popular article currently circulating the Internet is stating that the French eat more cheese than any other country, and therefore the French must have less heart disease because of the cheese.
Cheese consumption per capita, kg per annum.
In the actual study they took only 15 people and fed them equal calorie diets but one had more milk fat, one had more cheese, and one had more butter. Upon examining the men’s urine and feces, they found that the cheese group had lower levels of a molecule called TMAO (trimethylamine N-oxide), made by gut microbes when they break down animal-based foods and are linked to cardiovascular disease. The article then suggests that the study, funded directly by the Dairy Council, proves that it is in fact cheese preventing heart disease.
However, just because there is a correlation between two variables does not necessarily imply that one causes the other.
Did the study actually show the cheese group having less heart disease? Less hypertension? Less angina? No, no and no. These were healthy young and middle age people—there were no cardiac events in this short term study. Instead, the scientists looked only at a metabolite TMAO with a known association to heart disease.
All this tiny, short term study achieved was stating that the cheese has a lower TMAO than butter. They looked at a lab value without looking at the actual disease, did not have an actual control, and did not compare it to a plant-based group, known to produce the lowest TMAO.
The conclusion that cheese is good for your heart because it has a lower TMAO than butter is utterly unsound.
Conflict of Interest
This study was funded by the Dairy Council resulting in a direct conflict of interest.
There has been a known established link between industry funded nutrition-related scientific articles never showing a negative impact of the sponsors’ product. However, when studies are not funded by industry, outcomes show products to be harmful up to 37% of the time.
Industry funded studies have bias conclusions and potentially significant implications for public health—they cannot be ethically trusted.
Sources: PUBS Study, Dr Garth Davis, PBS, The French Paradox: Fact or Fiction, Dialogues in Cardiovascular Medicine Vol 13 Pg 193, NCBI Funding Source and Conclusion.
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