Here’s my explainer on the European-fed cheese glut that is killing America

Here’s another reason to hate the Europeans — their weak currency is going to destroy the American cardiovascular system.

I’m talking, of course, about the cheese glut.

Bloomberg reported today that America is sitting on a mountain of excess cheese — roughly 1.2 trillion pounds of the stuff is in inventories, up 20% since 2014.

And this isn’t that nice Yuppie cheese from non-cow animals. It’s mostly American cheese. The stuff that even we don’t want to eat.

We’re getting grilled has to do with the global currency market. Now maybe you’re not a Harvard MBA (full disclosure: I’m not a Harvard MBA), but it works this way: the euro is in steep decline right now — down nearly 18% since this time two years ago.

That’s why you can get a nice deal on a leather coat if you find yourself with a fistful of dollars in Milan. But it’s also why European cheese is flooding into America — it’s nearly 20% cheaper than it was two years ago.

Our imports of cheeses like Brie, Camembert, gouda and even that Swiss one with the holes in it (what’s that called again?) is up more than 9% this year and 28% in two years.

This sounded like a crisis, so my first call, of course, was to the USDA. If anyone was going to know about the cheese glut, it was the agency in charge of making sure Americans eat way more cheese than they’re supposed to.

A spokeswoman said government is not the problem.

“We are not stockpiling cheese at the USDA,” she said. “This is an issue with the private cheese industry.”

That didn’t help it all, so I did my own research — and discovered that we’re all in trouble.

See, Americans eat only about 30 pounds of cheese a year, half that of the French, which is counter-intuitive when you look at our waistlines. But that’s changing: Over the last 20 years, milk consumption has dropped 17% while increase in cheese consumption has been 41%.

Blame the federal government with its “Let them eat chevre” mentality. The USDA works with the dairy industry to promote cheese, even working with fast food giants to get more of the melty stuff into the American diet. Not to go all Area 51 on you, but that effort has also involved recent campaigns to convince us that cheese is good for us.

Here’s the problem: It isn’t.

“Cheese is the single largest source of saturated fat in the diet,” Eat Drink Politics summarized in its fear-mongering report, “Whitewashed: How Industry and Government Promote Dairy Junk Foods.”

Yet we’re eating so much of it lately. Why? Because the government has become our cheddar pusher: “The biggest factor driving the dramatic rise ... is the dairy industry’s multi-million dollar marketing effort aimed at convincing consumers that dairy is a health food.”

Seeking a voice of reason, I called Cheese Market News, which covers the cheese market like a piece of parmagian covers a chicken cutlet.

An editorial assistant confided in me that, yes, the office was “buzzing” about the cheese glut and the Cheese Market News story would hit the stands on Friday.

You know what that means: I scooped Cheese Market News on a news story about the cheese market.

But editorial director Kate Sander called me back to confirm my worst fears — and ease them, too.

Sander declined to blame the USDA for the nation’s rising demand for cheese (and pants in increasingly larger sizes), and said the market would correct itself once the current cheese glut is consumed by hungry Americans.

“This ‘mountain of cheese’ problem is more of a molehill,” she said. “The bigger problem, is there is so much milk — so much milk! — out there right now.”

Cheese mountain? More like a milk tsunami.

By the way, have I mentioned what a great health food whole milk can be...?