All About Cheese - Ask a Nutritionist

Transcript:

Welcome to the “Ask a Nutritionist” podcast, brought to you by Nutritional Weight and Wellness. We are thrilled to have you join us today as we discuss the connection between what you eat and how you feel, and share practical real life solutions for healthier living through balanced nutrition. Now let's get started.

LEAH: Hello and welcome to Dishing Up Nutrition's midweek segment called “Ask a Nutritionist”. My name is Leah Kleinschrodt. I'm a Registered and Licensed Dietitian with Nutritional Weight and Wellness. And on today's show I will be answering a few nutrition related questions about one particular topic and this question we received from our Dishing Up Nutrition listeners.

So these questions are all about a favorite staple food: cheese. So the question was “Cheese: is it good or bad? Should it be full fat or low fat? How much is okay? Is cottage cheese and cream cheese okay?” So again, we've got several questions around the same topic of cheese. These are really great questions. These are questions that come up all the time when I'm counseling with clients or if I'm teaching classes. Everyone wants to know about cheese cause it's a, again, it's a staple food. Everyone loves cheese. So really great questions.

And I think honestly, dairy products are an interesting category of foods. That's just my opinion. There can be some nuance there. There's, it's not all black and white, like where some other food groups… dairy foods, they just come in all sorts of forms. They range, I mean, this could range from our dairy fats like butter and ghee and cream cheese. And this goes all the way to things like then our cheese, yogurt, cottage cheese, ice cream, milk. Even whey protein powder is a dairy-based protein powder.

And then we can even focus on the topic of cheese or that category of cheese. And there's just this, there's a dizzying array of options and varieties when it comes to cheese. So we will try to simplify this answer down and make sure we hit all of those individual questions about cheese.

Is cheese good or bad to consume?

So I think maybe that first question of is cheese good or bad? Let's just start there. I want to just look through the lens of is cheese a real food or not? Because as at Nutritional Weight and Wellness, we always say real food to have real health and real food first. So that answer would be yes. Cheese is a real food. So we do include it as part of our Weight and Wellness way of eating.

Cheese & cottage cheese are in the protein category

Usually cheeses are under the protein category. In reality, cheese does have kind of a nice balance of some protein, some good fats and some carbohydrates. But we kind of just had to pick at least one category to put it in. So we do put it into the protein category. We'll just cover that last question really quick too of like, is cream cheese and cottage cheese okay? That yes, these are great options to use if we're looking at dairy or cheese in general. Cottage cheese would be in that protein category and usually about a half a cup, maybe three-fourths of a cup or so is the serving size that we're looking at for cottage cheese.

Cream cheese is in the fat category

And then cream cheese actually has a lower amount of protein and it's higher in fat. So we put that one in the fat category.

Choose full-fat vs. low-fat dairy

It actually is a good segue into that next segment of the question, you know, should when we're looking at cheese, should it be full fat or should it be low fat cheese? And with dairy products across the board, we recommend going full fat with any kind of dairy product. So cheese is no exception. Full fat cheese, as I mentioned before, will have some of those good healthy fats in them that help us help keep us fuller for longer. Fat is really important and helpful for keeping our blood sugar stable and dairy products with fat in it just tastes better overall.

And then when it comes to cheese, fat actually helps give cheese some of those functional properties that we want from cheese. I remember back from my days when I would eat more low fat and no fat type products. I mean, if you've ever tried to melt fat-free cheese or non-fat cheese onto say like a taco or something along those lines, you know full well that that just does not work as well. It doesn't melt as well and it just doesn't have that same mouth feel as cheese that has some fat and some “meltability” to it, if that's a word. So we do want full fat cheese.

How much cheese is okay to consume?

And now the question, the last one that we haven't quite addressed yet is how much cheese is okay? So this is the part where it gets a little more nuanced. If you're a longtime dishing up nutrition listener or a longer time dishing up nutrition listener, you know what we typically recommend at a meal in terms of protein is four ounces of protein at a meal. So that's about 28 grams of protein at a meal.

You are typically not going to get the full four ounces of protein from cheese alone. That would be a lot of cheese and your stomach may pay the price for that decision. A more typical amount for cheese, a serving size would be about one ounce of cheese and that could be at a meal or that might be part of your snack. And I do recognize there are some people, especially if I'm working with clients that have a little bit more limited protein options, I'm just thinking about clients who may prefer to be vegetarian. We may go a little higher in the cheese just because we need that as an option. But in general, think about one ounce of cheese per meal or snack would be a good serving size.

And then for people who tolerate dairy products well and know they do okay with cheese, they may be able to eat cheese several times a day. They may be able to have, say, some Parmesan or some feta cheese with their eggs in the morning and then have a string cheese for their afternoon snack and then maybe have some cheese on their hot dish or some kind of casserole in the evening. So there are people that do well with cheese, do well with dairy in general.

Limit dairy if weight loss is desired

What we tend to recommend for clients who desire weight loss, which is the majority of our clients, we find for some people it is helpful to limit dairy products in general to just one time per day. So this doesn't include butter, but if we're thinking about for people who might even drink like a glass of milk every single meal and then have cheese a couple meals a day, and then maybe you're doing yogurt as one of your snacks, like that can be a lot of dairy.

Dairy is a major allergen & food sensitivity

And dairy is one of the major allergens out there. There's eight major allergens and dairy is one of them. And dairy is also a common food sensitivity. So we know dairy has the potential to be an inflammatory food and with that inflammation it can stall out some of that weight loss. It can cause a host of other inflammatory issues as well. So we may have clients limit dairy, limit cheese to just one time a day. We may even ask them to take out dairy and cheese altogether for a couple of weeks and just check in and see how they feel when they eliminate it. And then how do they feel when they try to reintroduce it back in? That usually is your best bet in terms of determining what actually works for you.

And sometimes you don't know if a food or a food group doesn't work for you until you've run that experiment of eliminating and then reintroducing that food or that food group. That is personally what happened to me. I was one of those people that was having dairy several times a day. I was not a big milk drinker, but cheese and yogurt were big staples for me.

And it wasn't until I kind of took that leap and eliminated dairy for a couple of weeks that I actually noticed my joint pain felt a lot better. My skin improved. And when I tried to reintroduce it back in digestively, I didn't feel as good. And I did notice that for me personally, my skin would break out if I tried to do more dairy. And as time has gone on, I know I can do little tiny bits of dairy and little tiny bits of cheese here and there, but I know if I make it a regular habit or if I do a large amount in one sitting, that basically both my digestion and my skin are going to pay the price. So again, it might be worth running that experiment for some people just to kind of get a sense what's what's really happening in their body when they eat a certain food?

Softer cheeses can cause more issues for some people

I mentioned cheese, again, there's a lot of different kinds of cheeses out there. Different flavors and varieties and makeups of cheese. What I do tend to notice is that within that category of cheeses, say if you know that you have a little sensitivity or that you know that you do react to cheese, there are some cheeses that may tend to be more troublemakers than others. The softer cheeses tend to be more troublemakers just because they tend to have a little more lactose in them. And so some people just don't digest lactose really well. It can cause digestive issues or more inflammation in the body. So softer cheeses would be like mozzarella or like the fresher the cheese, more likely the softer it is and the more likely it's it's going to cause problems. So that could be mozzarella or feta cheese, brie, mascarpone, things like that.

Harder cheese tends to less inflammatory/better tolerated

The harder cheeses tend to be a little less inflammatory or can be a little better tolerated, especially again if you know that you have some sensitivity to cheese. So our harder cheeses would be like Parmesan cheese, some of the more aged cheddar cheeses, asiago cheese. Again, harder cheeses will tend to have less lactose in them and therefore usually are a little less inflammatory.

Is goat cheese okay?

And then to wrap up this particular topic, one question that I'll get asked a lot is, where does goat cheese fit in? And so goat cheese, it's, if you've used goat cheese, I'd say it is kind of in terms of like what it looks like, kind of looks more like feta. Usually you find it in crumbles. You can find it in kind of like log type of preparations. But goat cheese is cheese just coming from a different source. Instead of cow's milk, it's coming from goat's milk.

There are definitely some people, if you know you don't tolerate cow's milk cheese really well, some people actually do okay with goat milk cheese. That can be because the proteins are just a little bit different in cow versus goats. So some people do just fine with goat cheese and that can be a nice helpful option if you know you can't do regular cow's milk. It definitely has a unique flavor. If you've ever tried that before, kind of a unique flavor a little more, I mean it's, it's definitely noticeable. It's definitely different than your regular cheeses.

So it's not everyone's cup of tea, but it can be a nice alternative, again, if you want to put some cheese in your eggs or if you're looking for a particular, again, if you, you need some cheese on something and maybe like in my household, the rest of the family might be doing cheese on a certain type of hot dish or casserole. And then I'll do my portion using some goat cheese because I know I can do a little bit of that just fine.

So hopefully that answers some questions around cheese and what do we think about cheese and just in my experience how I've navigated the cheese conversation with clients. So I just wanted to thank everyone so much for listening to Dishing Up Nutrition’s “Ask a Nutritionist”. And if you have a question that you would like us to answer, maybe you want to know more about cheese or maybe there's a different topic that really has piqued your interest or that you've never heard a really great answer to and you want us to flush it out a little bit more, we invite you to join our Dishing Up Nutrition Facebook community.

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