A large Swedish study suggests that some high-fat dairy foods are linked to a lower risk of dementia.
Researchers in Sweden used data from the Malmö Diet and Cancer cohort, which included 27,670 adults aged 45 to 73 in Malmö, Sweden.
The team then conducted interviews, collected food diaries, and asked the patients questionnaires to calculate how much of each dairy product people ate per day. They also separated dairy into high-fat and low-fat types. High-fat cheese was defined as more than 20% fat, and high-fat cream as more than 30% fat.
Participants joined the study between 1991 and 1996 and were followed for an average of 25 years afterward.
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The main outcome they looked at was all-cause dementia, while Alzheimer's disease (AD) and vascular dementia (VaD) were studied separately. Over the follow-up period, 3,208 people developed dementia. Within these groups, those who consumed high-fat cheese were significantly less likely to develop dementia.
"We were a bit surprised to see a lower dementia risk among people who ate more high-fat cheese," Emily Sonestedt, associate professor of nutritional epidemiology at Lund University in Sweden, told Fox News Digital.
At the same time, she says it isn’t entirely unexpected to see a link with vascular dementia.
"Many dementia cases involve damage to small blood vessels in the brain. Our own previous work, and several international studies, including from the US, have shown neutral or slightly protective associations between cheese and cardiovascular disease."
The study adjusted for factors such as age, sex, education, smoking, physical activity, alcohol use, body mass index, hypertension, overall diet quality, and other dairy products.
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People who ate at least 50 grams per day of high-fat cheese had a lower risk of all-cause dementia compared with those eating less than 15 grams per day. They also had a lower risk of vascular dementia.
High-fat cream showed a similar pattern: people consuming at least 20 grams per day had a 16% lower risk for all-cause dementia compared with non-consumers.
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Other dairy products did not show clear links with overall dementia risk. Low-fat cheese, low-fat cream, milk, fermented milk, and butter generally showed no association with all-cause dementia.
One exception was that high butter intake (at least 40 grams a day) was associated with a higher risk of Alzheimer's disease. The study also found that high-fat cheese was linked to lower AD risk only among people who did not carry the APOE ε4 risk variant, a genetic variant linked to Alzheimer's.
This was an observational study, so it cannot show cause and effect, and unmeasured factors may still play a role.
"The study was conducted in Sweden, where people mainly eat hard, fermented cheeses, so the results may not apply directly to countries with very different cheese types and eating patterns," said Sonestedt.
Diet was measured only once, so changes over time were not fully captured. Cream intake was measured with less precision than cheese.
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"Although we adjusted for many lifestyle and health factors, it is still difficult to say that the cheese itself is protective. It is more likely part of a broader eating pattern and lifestyle that may support long-term brain health," researchers noted.
Dementia diagnoses after 2014 were not validated in detail, and baseline cognitive status was not available.
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Some dementia cases may have been missed, and the results are from a Swedish population, which may limit generalization.
The findings were published in Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.
