CHEESY ADVICE

What is CLA? My friends are telling me I should be eating more cheese to get CLA because it prevents cancer. Does it? I've been avoiding cheese because of the fat.

CLA is conjugated linoleic acid, a naturally occurring trans fat. It occurs in cheese, and beef, too. Yes, there's a little evidence that it might help slow or prevent cancer growth. But for the pounds or tons of cheese you'd need to eat to get meaningful amounts, and the uncertainty of how much you'd need to make any significant difference, it's not worth it. You'd also be getting a lot more extra fat, especially saturated fat, and calories with the cheese. Because CLA is a fat, the reduced fat and fat-free cheeses have little to none of it.

When the label on a package of meat says "10 percent fat," does that mean 10 percent of the calories come from fat? I know the guidelines say to keep the calories from fat to under 30 percent, but I don't know how that compares to the ground beef label.

Unfortunately it's not easy to figure calories from the percentage of fat on the label. The 10 percent fat refers to the quantity of fat vs. quantity of lean meat in the package. If fat and lean meat had the same number of calories per gram, it would be easy to compare them. But, fat has 9 calories per gram and protein has only 4 calories. To make it harder, lean meat has a lot more water, at 0 calories per gram, and fat has none. Plus, not all the fat in meat is the less-healthy saturated fat. Some is unsaturated and not as much of a risk to our heart health. Here are some numbers to compare: in a 3-ounce serving of pan-broiled ground beef, 5 percent fat beef has 139 calories and 5 grams of saturated fat; 10 percent fat beef has 173 calories and 9 grams of saturated fat; 15 percent fat beef has 197 calories and 12 grams saturated fat; and 20 percent fat beef has 209 calories and 14 grams of saturated fat. The best thing to do is choose the lowest percentage fat ground beef you can afford, cook it in a way that the fat can drip off, and remove as much of the fat as you can before you eat it. Beef can be a very healthy part of a diet if chosen and prepared well.

I'm trying to drink more milk to get the calcium. I can manage 2 percent milk, but have heard that I should drink skim (ugh!) because it has so much more calcium. They both have the same percentage calcium on the label. Is there really such a big difference, or is the label wrong?

There is a difference, but it's not big, which is why the label isn't wrong. The label is working on the percentage needed in a 2,000-calorie diet, or 1,200 mg. Whole milk is about 4 percent to 5 percent fat. When that is removed, the skim milk that takes its place in a cup does add a little bit more calcium. But while whole milk has 290 mg, 2 percent milk has 298 mg and skim milk about 301 mg. That's not a big enough difference in calcium to worry about. The fat is another matter, and skim milk is probably better for us there. So use skim to cook, make pudding, in soups, etc., and drink the 2 percent.