A grilled cheese sandwich. That’s real comfort food! But is eating one every day going to reduce your risk of dementia?

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There with you then. Here with you now. As a critical part of the community for over 245 years,The Gazette continues to deliver trusted English-language news and coverage on issues that matter. Subscribe now to receive:

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That’s the conclusion that some may draw from a Swedish study that sent the media into rapture, spewing out headlines about high-fat cheese preventing dementia. The study recently published in the journal Neurology found people who ate 50 grams or more of high-fat cheese daily for up to 25 years had a 13 per cent lower risk of dementia than those eating less than 15 grams. What we have here is yet another paper destined be tossed on the growing heap of nutritional studies that may have been properly carried out as far as methodology goes, but have essentially no practical significance.

First, the results barely reach statistical significance. Then there is the issue of the food frequency questionnaires being completed only once at the beginning of the trial with the assumption that diets would not be altered over the period of the study, which is unlikely. The most significant reductions in the risk of dementia were among subjects whose high cheese consumption paralleled a reduction in both processed and red meat intake, so any........

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