Cheese it! Snacking for nutrition

By Bradley Morris

Cheese is a tricky food. It’s calorically very dense, is high in fat and often has high amounts of sodium; however, there are many types of cheese, and for each kind, there’s a different nutrition label. While different types of, say, cheddars will look very similar, cheddar might be high in fat and sodium while Swiss is comparatively low in both (again, comparatively), meaning incorporating cheese into a healthy lifestyle might be more possible than some think. Some people have specific dietary needs that make cheese a poor fit for them, so always check with your doctor or a nutritionist before changing your eating habits.

With that out of the way, why would you want to eat more cheese? Well, maybe you don’t want to eat more cheese, but if you avoid cheese because of the negatives I’ve listed above, it might be good to reconsider. There are some almost universal benefits to cheese: it’s a good source of calcium, and if you have a hard time getting enough protein, snacking on cheese can be a great way to help you reach your goal – and cheese such as cottage and ricotta have whey protein, making them a good choice to help build muscle.

One of the heavy hitters in cheese is Swiss, as mentioned before. Compared to most other cheeses, Swiss typically has lower fat, lower sodium, lower carbs and higher protein than other popular cheeses while still being a good source of calcium and protein. There is a reason Swiss gets paired with turkey so much, and that’s because it is one of the healthier cheeses you can choose. If you want to get more cheese or get a healthier kind of cheese but don’t want to spent a lot of time checking nutrition labels, defaulting to Swiss is a solid strategy.

Of course, one huge risk of cheese is how well it pairs with many other foods, many of which aren’t good for you. It’s easy to reach for a carb-heavy food such as crackers when you’re enjoying some cheese, but remember cheese is already very calorie dense, and many types of breads, crackers and other carb-heavy foods don’t have a very good nutrition-to-calorie ratio, so you’ll be taking on a lot of calories without a whole lot of diverse benefit. Depending on your tastes and preferences, it’s much better to pair cheese with meats and fruits, so even if you’re getting a lot of calories, there’s still a better mix of vitamins and nutrients you’ll be getting.

And obviously, when I say it might be a good idea to get more cheese into your diet, I don’t mean the foods you see on social media that are just oozing with cheese, so don’t even go there.

While cheese can be an extremely unhealthy food if eaten at a large quantity, there are so many factors to it that most of us can work it in to our diets without much health risk. Carefully reading nutrition labels and watching your scale and other vitals is important to making sure you aren’t overdoing it, but adding a little bit of cheese to your diet can give you some more diverse nutrition and some awesome flavors.