Regardless of the various toppings and sauces you can get with your incredible pie, you truly haven't lived until you've had a pizza adorned with five different toppings. Four's fine, I suppose, but five's fantastic. Parmesan, cheddar, mozzarella and gorgonzola, but instead of a tomato sauce, the base was adorned with brie.
It was heaven.
But apart from trying to make you jealous, why on earth would I bring that up? Oh, because if this study's anything to go by, I might have just bought myself a whole lot of credit moving forward when it comes to overall longevity. This amazing study says that eating cheese is the key to living a longer life, and who am I to argue with science?
For more, let's look a bit closer at this study published in the medical journal The Lancet, in which researchers from McMaster University in Canada looked at a whopping 130,000 people from 21 different countries, all of whom were between 35 and 70 years old. What did they look for in these people? Well, their dietary habits were noted, and then separated into two camps - reduced-fat dairy and full-fat dairy.
So here's the thing: eating more than two servings a day of that processed cow milk was conducive to seeing some major decreases in not only your risk of a stroke, but for risk of cardiovascular disease as well. They also found that while cheese did have an impact on those results, you can also see some pretty good benefits by consuming yoghurt or milk.
For test subjects who ate less than 0.5 servings of dairy a day, their mortality rate rose to 44.4 percent overall, with five percent of that being down to cardiovascular disease alone.
Of course, we don't readily associate eating a lot of cheese with lowering our chance of death, but Ian Givens, a professor of food chain nutrition at Reading University in the UK, says that this study is vital to changing the public perception of dairy, hopefully helping to change the way dietary guidelines look at dairy intake.
“It also adds weight to the evidence that saturated fats from dairy [probably apart from butter] are not associated with increased cardiovascular disease risk, unlike some other sources," explained Givens.
Mahshid Dehghan, who is an investigator at the Nutrition Epidemiology program at the Population Health Research Institute of McMaster University as well as the lead author on this study, and she argued that we shouldn't rule out dairy products just because they happen they happen to produce a lot of fatty acids.
"Dairy products contain a range of potentially beneficial compounds including specific amino acids, medium-chain and odd-chain saturated fats, milk fat globule phospholipids, unsaturated and branched-chain fats, natural trans fats, vitamin K1/K2, and calcium, and can further be fermented or contain probiotics, many of which may also affect health outcomes."
Of course, the study needs more research to figure out exactly why dairy leads to so many health benefits, but we can all rest easy tonight knowing that extra cheese pizza is actually really good for your health.
Some might even call it medicine.