Professor Sarah Berry

So this is another word for the kind of fats that are produced in our body.

And that increases our cholesterol levels and increases our levels of circulating triglycerides.

But to loop back to what you mentioned about cheese, I think that's a really good example of how we need to move beyond this simplistic approach of thinking about the types of fat.

So I just said that actually the type of saturated fat you have in butter is bad for us.

Now, dairy cheese, so fermented dairy such as cheese and yogurt, has a really similar fatty acid composition to butter.

But actually, it doesn't have the same unfavorable effects on our health as butter does.

And the reason is, is because of this matrix, the kind of special structure in which dairy

The fatty acids sit within the dairy products that are fermented within the cheese and the yogurt.

So you could feed people a moderate cheese diet and moderate butter diet.

The cheese wouldn't have any unfavorable effects, yet actually the butter would have an unfavorable effect despite having a similar fat composition.

It is because food is really complicated and it's magical because how we process food has a huge impact on its health outcomes.

So how we process dairy, whether it's as butter or whether it's as cheese or whether it's as yogurt, can hugely impact health.

how our body responds to it.

The same applies for how we process other foods, whether it's consuming whole fruit or consuming pureed fruit or consuming whole almonds or consuming ground almonds where you're changing the matrix.

It has a huge impact on this bioaccessibility that I mentioned earlier, so the release of nutrients and how our body processes them.

And I think dairy is a really nice example of how we need to look beyond the nutrients and we need to think about the food that it's actually contained within.

Yes, in my opinion.

I think it's worth mentioning that broadly speaking, epidemiological studies, so these big studies that will be following people over a number of years or looking at one point in time in thousands of people and then looking at certain health outcomes and looking at dietary intakes, they do consistently show that a high saturated fatty acid diet is less favorable than a high mono or polyunsaturated fatty acid diet at the population level.

But when we do clinical trials, what we know is once we start to tease this apart, it becomes really apparent that that's too simplistic.

And at an individual level and at a food level, it's again, far too simplistic that we need to consider the type of fatty acids.