I don’t eat cheese or drink wine for my health, but it’s gratifying to learn that both may have benefits. When a study recently published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease suggested that daily cheese and wine consumption correlated with mental acuity, you could practically hear glasses clinking around the globe. We like getting the doctor’s approval for what we’re going to do anyway. Astonishingly, compared with 48 other foods, cheese topped the charts. It was by far the most protective against cognitive decline in older adults studied over a decade. I spoke to the study’s lead investigators, from Iowa State University, for some insights into this unexpected outcome.

Auriel Willette, an assistant professor in Food Science and Human Nutrition at Iowa State University, was the principal investigator, along with neuroscience Ph.D. candidate Brandon Klinedinst. They analyzed a large British database that followed older adults for a decade, measuring their cognitive abilities at several intervals. Willette, Klinedinst and their team correlated the test results with what the adults reporting eating. Participants were asked, at intervals, to report their intake of 49 foods, including dried fruit, cooked vegetables, lean fish and coffee. Cheese outperformed everything else. Daily alcohol consumption, particularly red wine, also correlated with improved brain function. Now there’s some good news to end a dreadful year.

Our interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Were you surprised by the public response to the study?

Klinedinst: The first place I saw response was on Reddit in a science subforum. Within several hours there were 30,000 upvotes and 2,000 comments. What was surprising was to see disparaging comments. “This is junk science because how can cheese be healthy when it’s high in saturated fat? How can wine be healthy when it’s empty calories?” From non-North Americans, the response has been more positive.

What do you know about the 1,787 adults in the cohort? How were they selected from the half-million who are in the UK database?

Klinedinst: I didn’t use participants who had incomplete data, so that’s how it was whittled down. We did control for socioeconomic status, but it was more or less a strictly Caucasian cohort. The results might not generalize to people of African or East Asian descent.

Willette: That’s why we restricted it to white British. It was intentional. The second most populous group in the UK is people of Asian-Indian ancestry. The diets are so different (from British Caucasians) that it would be difficult to compare.

Any insights in the data about how much cheese or what types of cheese provide the most protection against cognitive decline?

Klinedinst: Honestly, no. The data collected didn’t distinguish type of cheese. We just know it was cheese. We compared people who said they never ate cheese with people eating cheese daily, and eating cheese daily had a significant positive effect. But I can’t comment on small, medium or large amounts. That would be nice to know.

Any guesses about the components of cheese that might be beneficial?

Willette: If I had to pin it on one thing, it would probably be conjugated linoleic acid (CLA). Saturated fat can be inflammatory, but it looks like CLA has greater anti-inflammatory effects. And milk from grass-fed cows has three to five times as much CLA. If we’re assuming causality and not just an interesting correlation, CLA could be important for dilating capillaries, which is how our brains soak up nutrients from incoming blood. CLA might make it easier for nutrients to be taken up. So the brain has more fuel and can do more processing. That might correspond to handling information more quickly or accurately. That’s the basic idea.

Were cheese and wine together more protective than either one alone?

Klinedinst: We didn’t test that, but based on our model, we feel comfortable saying there’s an additive effect, that you get bonus points for doing both.

Willette: The “party effect,” as it were.

Have you changed your own diet as a result of your findings?

Klinedinst: I have a little bit, yes. I went 10 years without having dairy. But with this study, we saw interesting effects for cheese on body composition as well. Daily cheese consumption was beneficial for weight loss. When I saw body results and mind results lining up, I started eating more yogurt and cheese.

Did you anticipate this result?

Willette: In the popular media, when cheese is mentioned, it’s like it’s indulgent or “sinful,” which is ridiculous. There’s a constant emphasis on saturated fat, so it was not the first food I would have assumed would come up (as protective). I figured it would be cruciferous vegetables or eating less meat. I did not anticipate that people who drink red wine daily and eat cheese daily would be the ones who have that mental sharpness compared to others. It’s not a small effect either. It’s rather sizeable.

Brandon, you have said that you believe the right food choices could prevent Alzheimer’s disease and cognitive decline altogether. Is that a mainstream view among researchers?

Klinedinst: I don’t think so. Researchers have focused on finding biomarkers associated with the disease and coming up with a pill that addresses those biomarkers. But those studies haven’t produced a whole lot.

Willette: The studies are mixed, but more suggest that exercise and food therapy might be more effective than the drugs we’ve tried to slow or stop Alzheimer’s.

Regarding cheese consumption and Alzheimer’s, what are the next questions to ask?

Klinedinst: I’d like to look at more cheese quality-related parameters. Surely certain types of cheese might be more or less healthy. Is grass-fed cheese superior to typical cheese? If we could start ascertaining how cheese is having its effect, it would help validate the results. A lot of people were taught that fat is bad, and cheese has fat. Therefore, cheese must be bad.

When you’re talking about older adults who might be experiencing some cognitive decline, how accurate is self-reporting about diet?

Willette: Somewhere deep in my file drawer there’s a marinating report on self-reporting and health outcomes. For things that people regard as “bad,” like consuming pizza, they tend to under-report. So I think, if anything, more people might actually be eating cheese and drinking red wine. Unfortunately, diet questionnaires are all we have unless we bring them into a closed facility and feed them what we want.