You may have heard the expression knowledge is power.

Well, today we're going to give you more power to control your diet and lifestyle by giving you the facts.

Welcome to the Nutrition Facts Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Greger.

Today we take a critical look at one of the foods people have trouble cutting down on.

We start with the simple question, is cheese really bad for you?

In a series of videos I did about saturated fat. I talked about a major campaign launched by the global dairy industry to

neutralize the negative image of milk fat among regulators and health professionals as related to heart disease.

That campaign continues to this day with the publication of a meta-analysis demonstrating neutral, meaning non-harmful associations

between dairy products and cardiovascular disease and death.

Okay, well, first of all, how do we know the dairy industry had anything to do with this study?

Well, it was published in a journal that forces authors to disclose financial conflicts of interest.

Let's see what they divulged.

Dairy-dairy, dairy-dairy, dairy, the fourth largest dairy company in the world, dairy-dairy milk, beer soda,

McDonald's, dairy-dairy-dairy-dairy.

Oh, and the study itself was explicitly funded by...

Dairy-dairy-dairy.

Okay, then.

The other big new one was this, suggesting that a little bit of cheese every day isn't just neutral, but actually good for you.

And they make it clear that they have no conflicts of interest.

They're just employees of the Yili Innovation Center and the Yili R&D Center.

You know, China's largest dairy producer, making it one of the world's largest dairy companies?

Okay, but how can cheese consumption be associated with better health outcomes?

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