The Enemy: Cheese

I've blogged several times about the problem of Americans' increasing weight and waists. This is a national medical problem of epidemic proportions, partly because overweight is correlated with increased risk for diabetes and other diseases.

Nutritionists and other medical experts have, naturally, been looking for causes and a lot of candidates have been proposed. And doubtless what is going on is more than one cause working at the same time.

A few causes of increasing overweight and obesity in America (and other countries) which I find plausible are as follows (not in any particular order):

• Our increasingly sedentary lives (e.g., more time spent with TV, computers, video games).
  
• Increasing size of the portions served in restaurants.
• Advertising for food (especially for fast-food chains) on TV. When food items are shown to us, it makes us want to get up and grab a snack.
• Increasing consumption of soft drinks which, with their high content of sugar (or high fructose corn syrup) are known to contribute an increasing number of calories to our diets.
• People eating more of their meals in fast-food restaurants, where the food is high in fat, sodium, and calories.

Now, I have another trend in our diets to propose as promoting weight gain: cheese. Cheese is mostly fat (from the milk it's made from), and fat is much higher in calories than the other nutrients (protein, carbohydrate, and fiber) or constituents of our food.

More and more of what we eat seems to have cheese in it or on it. Nowadays you almost can't get any sandwich with meat or poultry that does not also have cheese in it. On some restaurant menus, it's difficult to find dishes that haven't got cheese. Statistics show that cheese consumption has been increasing in America. (According to Wikipedia, US cheese consumption has nearly tripled between 1970 and 2003.)

Cheese added to a dish adds much more fat and calories than you might think. Those multilayer hamburgers, with several beef patties and several slices of cheese as well, have calorie and fat values that are almost beyond belief—like a day's worth (or more!) of fat and sodium.

So we are tempted by these restaurant offerings, and—guess what! We don't resist. Maybe we need to start to think twice when we're ordering our food.

Update, July 23, 2011
I recently read an item in Nutrition Action HealthLetter, the publication of the Center for Science in the Public Interest (the people who periodically make the news with, for example, their exposés of movie-theater popcorn) that said precisely the same thing, about the prevalence of cheese in restaurant menu offerings. But remember, you heard it here first. They also say that the dairy industry persuaded restaurants to add cheese to their menu offerings.
And I want to confess, I love cheese--but maybe not in or on everything. I like to snack on cheese by itself, or eat it in a sandwich. Once in a while I'll sprinkle grated cheese on my pasta or use cheese in cooking. But I have cut way, way down, and also I sometimes buy reduced-fat cheese. (Some of them are pretty good.) But maybe I should be worrying about the sodium in cheese as much as the fat.

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein