Good News for Cheese Lovers: Science Says Cheese Might Be Good for Your Gut

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The good news about cheese just keeps rolling in, folks. Last week, a survey revealed that grilled cheese lovers have more sex than people who don’t love grilled cheese (because, apparently, there are people in the world who don’t love grilled cheese). And now, a new study shows cheese could be the key to changing your gut bacteria for the better. Best news you’ve heard all week, right?

As TIME reports, during the study, published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, 15 healthy young men ate three different diets, all the same in calories and fat, for two weeks each. The difference between the diets was this: One was high in fat from 1.5-percent milk, one required the men to eat 1.7 grams of cow cheese every day, and one was a control diet.

In the end, researchers found that when study participants consumed a good dose of dairy each day, particularly during the cheese-heavy diet, their gut bacteria changed and their levels of TMAO, a type of gut bacteria associated with heart disease, decreased.

But before you prescribe yourself an all-grilled-cheese diet for your health, know: The study was small, and more research needs to be done. As the study’s co-author Morten Rahr Clausen told TIME, “I’m not completely sure why, but it seems like the cheese and also milk, but mainly cheese, affects the microbiota after eating cheese and that might affect the composition of the lipids in the blood.”

The takeaway: Researchers don’t know exactly what’s going on in your gut when you eat cheese, but the findings of the study suggest cheese does the gut good. We’ll take it.

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