Where's the cheese? Nature's strategy for structural nutrition

Cheese contains a complex arrangement of nutrients that interact to form what we know as structure. The release of these nutrients confers health benefits to the human body, but the effect depends upon the processing steps during cheese manufacture, interactions with other nutritive components, and a complex series of biochemical reactions that occur during oral, gastric, and intestinal digestion. Cheese undergoes comparatively little structural disintegration under mouth and stomach in vitro digestive conditions, and most cheese digestion takes place during the intestinal phase. Cheese molecular components are also present to modulate uptake of other components. One example of this is a complex lipid called sphingomyelin which interacts with cholesterol to alter cheese digestibility and deliver positive effects for human health. This presentation will outline why structural interactions are an essential part of understanding nutrition, and why cheese is an exemplar of an optimal strategy for nutritional delivery.