Corduroy Orange

hey - I know someone who really loves cheese (the good stuff, we’re not talking Velveeta or Kraft here), but she’s worried about cholesterol content.

Is there any data out there on cholesterol and fat content of non-processed cheeses, and I am especially interested to see if you compare the cheeses made from different animals (ie, sheep, goat, lamb and cow). Maybe a comparison of a fresh-style cheese (meaning still high in cream/water) for each and then a hardened, aged chese for each. I’ve heard that harder cheeses tend to be healthier than soft cheeses. Is one animal’s cheese in general healthier than another’s?

There are a variety of sources where you can find nutritional information about cheeses. One of the more comprehensive is the USDA, which has a web page where you can get full nutritional information for a wide range of cheeses.

Based on the information available on this page, I examined a variety of cheeses for nutritional content, from imitation cheese food product to higher-end gourmet cheeses. Based on the data I found, there is no hard and fast rule as to whether a harder cheese contains more or less fat than a softer cheese.

Goat cheeses, for instance, have higher fat and cholesterol content the harder they get. A hard goat cheese contains about 35.5 grams of fat and 105 mg of cholesterol per 100 grams of cheese, whereas a soft goat cheese has only 21 grams of fat and 46 mg of cholesterol for the same sample.

Parmesan and romano, which are for most purposes interchangeable, are close to each other in fat content (25.8 g for parm & 26.9 for romano), but vary widely in cholesterol (68 mg parm & 104 mg romano). A similar spread is seen in the fairly similar softer cow’s milk cheeses brie and camambert. Brie weighs in at 27.7 g fat and 100 mg cholesterol. Camembert has almost 90% of the fat content (24.3 g) but only 72% of the cholesterol (72 mg).

It’s worth mentioning, I think, that the merits/ demerits of cheese can’t really be boiled down to two figures from a vast array of nutritional information. Whereas cheese tends to be a fairly fatty food, it is also high in calcium and vitamin A and low in sugar, and has all kinds of enzymes and other incalculables (including taste). When part of a diet (meaning nutritional intake, not denial of food) consisting of a wide range of colorful vegetables, whole grains, legumes, etc., even the fattiest of cheeses can be eaten in moderation without reason for even a modicum of guilt [though if your cardiologist has advised you otherwise, I'd take his/her advice over mine]. Case in point is the fact that imitation cheese food–a product that contains more emulsifiers and crap than actual cheese and has little or no resemblance to a naturally occurring substance (thus the presence of imitation in its name) has the lowest fat and cholesterol content out of all the cheeses surveyed for this list.

When I have a choice between real and imitation, I always opt for the real thing. I don’t necessarily have a ton of it (though I will admit to slathering my waffles with pats of butter and topping them with rivulets of real maple syrup) and I also really enjoy and eat lots of fresh fruits & vegetables, minimally processed grains, and so on. And while it’s true that I’ve been blessed with an active metabolism, I also feel that there’s something to be said for using actual food as the building blocks of my diet as opposed to processed things containing corn syrup and chemicals—eat naturally good foods and be naturally healthy. That’s my theory, anyway.

The information in the following chart was obtained from http://riley.nal.usda.gov/NDL/cgi-bin/nut_search_new.pl

This entry was posted on Friday, May 25th, 2007 at 5:25 pm and is filed under Advice Column, Food Chemistry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.