New Study: Ingredient In Cheese Could Help Longevity, Healthy Heart

BOSTON (CBS) -- Cheese is a delightful treat, it almost always makes food even more enjoyable than it is already. But venturing to the reverse side of a block of cheese is a borderline nightmare when actually reading the nutritional facts.

But, there may well be something in cheese that helps us justify enjoying nachos and quesadillas and putting cheese on anything hot all the time. According to the journal Natural Medicine, there's a compound found in some cheeses, spermidine, that could increase longevity.

The experiment was conducted on rats and mice, and the initial study found that spermidine increased the lifespan of the rats and mice.

If that's not enough, there's more: it's beneficial to a healthy heart.

They experimented on 800 Italians, because Italy features a cheese-heavy diet, the ones who had more spermidine had a 40% lower chance of heart failure.

Spermidine is typically found in aged cheese, like some types of cheddar, gruyere, manchego, gouda and parmesan-type cheese.