Can Eating Certain Hard Cheeses Help Prevent Cancer? (0:54)
There are some hard cheeses, including Swiss, Gouda and Jarlsberg, that can actually prevent cancer. In this video, disease prevention specialist William Li, MD, explains how these hard cheeses work to prevent cancer, and how much you should eat.
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So it might be surprising to people that cheeses can actually prevent cancer, but it's actually true. Hard cheeses not soft cheeses, and the reason is you need to use a bacteria to create cheese, and one of the side effects or byproducts of the bacteria used for hard cheese generates a cancer fighter called vitamin K2 or menaquinone.
So when you eat actually a hard cheese, and these hard cheeses are typically the ones that you find in northern Europe, so Jarlsberg, Gouda, Swiss Cheese the technical name is Emmentaler but there are others as well, you're actually eating these cancer fighting substances. How much do you have to have? Well actually not that much.
Studies have shown that you only need to eat as little as two slices of cheese a day to get the benefit of lowering your risk of lung cancer by 62%.
William Li, MD, is President, Medical Director, and Co-founder of the Angiogenesis Foundation. He has been actively involved in angiogenesis research and development for 22 years. Li trained with Judah Folkman, a pioneer of the field.
