The scientists over at Aarhus University in Denmark are certainly on our Christmas card list this year after a study that they conducted appears to suggest that cheese could well be the key to a reduction in obesity as well as kick-starting your metabolism.

Wallace was certainly onto something….

The team were intrigued by what is known as the ‘French Paradox’, the contradictory situation where our French friends tend to live longer and are typically healthier despite consuming diets high in saturated fats.

Most of the research into this area has focused on wine and wider lifestyle choices, but this study seems to offer a far simpler explanation.

The average French person consumes around 24kg of cheese per year and has a life expectancy of 82 years. Here, in the United Kingdom, we eat 11.6kg of cheese per person, suffer from twice the levels of cardiovascular disease and, on average, live a year less than our French counterparts.

Hanne Bertram, one of the food scientists who undertook this study, looked at urine and faecal samples from a group of participants, all of whom had consumed a fair quantity of dairy products.

After analysing the samples (which I’m sure was dirty work…), it was found that those who ate cheese had higher than average levels of butyric acid.

Now, butyric acid has popped up in scientific studies before and has previous been linked to reducing obesity and increasing metabolism.

This “suggests a role for gut microbes and further [secures] the connection between cheese and the French paradox,” Bertram says.

The study is available to read in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.