Before I went entirely plant-based, I’d meet people from time to time that didn’t eat cheese and it would genuinely perplex me. Was their quality of life diminished since they were depriving themselves of one of life’s simple pleasures? I assumed if I ever attempted to quit cheese then I’d forever be catching glimpses of other people moaning with delight as they tucked into their grilled cheese sandwiches while I just stood by dripping with envy. Wouldn’t meals seem incomplete without cheese?
I started migrating towards a plant-based diet back in 2016 and cheese was the last to go in 2022. What did me in? A 3-minute description on The Exam Room podcast of the reality of the life of dairy cows. That was all I needed to hear to change my perception of cheese — in that moment with tears in my eyes for all those mama and baby cows being separated, I didn’t want anything to do with dairy anymore. I actually announced aloud, to no one in particular except myself, “I’m done.” And I was. I stopped eating cheese and never looked back.
I was hooked nearly my entire life but now I don’t think about cheese anymore when I step into the kitchen to whip up a meal and I can walk by the cheese display at the store completely unphased. I’m still blown away by my lack of desire for cheese now since I can remember loving it so passionately my entire life. I didn’t realize until after I quit cheese how much of it I was actually eating. I was putting cheese in essentially everything I cooked besides cereal and thinking my meals were still sparkling healthy.
It was surprisingly easy to ditch cheese even though I spent the past half decade thinking it would forever be the exception to my otherwise plant-based diet. I stopped buying it so I stopped eating it. After two weeks the same thing happened with cheese as every other animal product that I stopped eating: I simply didn’t want it anymore.
Your brain on cheese
How many vegetarians say, “I can eat a plant-based diet but I just can’t give up CHEESE!”? It seems like most of them and I can’t even count how many times I’ve personally said that. It’s become such a norm, this cheese addiction, that no one seems to question why we all, even vegetarians, are so obsessed with cheese. How does cheese have it’s hooks in us that deep? Even the beloved bacon isn’t a struggle to abandon once you switch to plant-based. I mean, how many people are on a plant-based diet but then eat bacon every day because they just can’t quit it? Not many.
It’s not just a coincidence, here’s what’s going on: cheese is derived from cow’s milk and cow’s milk contains casomorphins, a mild opioid released from casein during digestion. These casomorphins attach to dopamine receptors, causing your brain to release dopamine, the feel-good neurotransmitter. The opiate-like activity from casomorphins light up the same brain receptors that heroin and other narcotics do.1 Of course cheese isn’t as strong as narcotics but it’s still working in the same way on a milder scale. Hence the reason why we keep going back for more. We are literally hooked.
We take a bite of cheese and it feeeeels good. “Mmmmm,” we moan while taking a bite of a creamy aged brie, closing our eyes and taking in that glorious feeling. You can almost taste it right now, can’t you? You better believe our brains are busy bookmarking that glorious feeling, making sure we go back for more next time it’s available. Of course cheese is going to be more difficult to abandon than, say, pork chops, when it’s lighting up the same part of the brain as heroin. Human breast milk also contains these beta-casomorphins that gives opioid-like activity, but of course in a much smaller dose than cow’s milk. And what’s even richer in casomorphines than cow’s milk? Cheese. It takes 10 pounds of milk to make 1 pound of cheese, which makes cheese incredibly concentrated with casomorphins. That’s why vegetarians can give up milk so much easier than cheese.
Why are casomorphins in milk? The presence of this opioid-like compound is thought to aid in mother-infant and cow-calf bonding. It’s a survival mechanism; baby/calf feel good when drinking mom’s milk and the brain bookmarks this feeling and knows where to go for more of this perfectly tailored nutritious food designed for the young to grow big and survive.
It doesn’t help that cheese is loaded with fat and salt, also making it addictive. Fat and salt aren’t easy to find in nature and when we find a source our brains remember it so we want to go back for more. Unfortunately, cheese is packed with saturated fat rather than a “healthy” fat and we don’t need any saturated fat in our diets at all.
“Milk and other dairy products are the top source of saturated fat in the American diet, contributing to heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and Alzheimer’s disease. Studies have also linked dairy to an increased risk of breast, ovarian, and prostate cancers.”2
A book I’d highly recommend to anyone and everyone is The Cheese Trap by Dr. Neal Barnard. I read this book immediately after giving up cheese (Barnard was the 3-minute speaker on the podcast) and I knew he’d have the information I was looking for. The book was fabulous; incredibly educational but easy to read, entertaining, and reinforced that I’d made one of the best decisions of my life by finally letting go of my cheese addiction. Two weeks is all it takes to change your taste preferences.
Mutations and hot chocolate
I was sitting at a hike summit with a friend, we stopped for lunch and found a nice spot facing the rugged Icicle Peaks. I pull out my tempeh sandwich and he gave it a quizzical look, “What is that?!” My plant-based diet has always puzzled him. He’d never heard of tempeh so I explained what it was. “Oh, it’s SOY,” he scowled. “Aren’t you worried about getting breast cancer eating that?” he asked me as he took a swig of his thermos of hot chocolate. I’m not making this up, the timing of his question was impeccable. I explained the soy misconception and he grunted in vague acknowledgement. I pointed at his hot chocolate and asked him if he was worried about breast cancer drinking that. He chuckled with disbelief, why on earth would milk give anyone breast cancer?
Cow’s milk is a perfect concoction of nutrients designed for baby calves to grow very quickly. Dairy contains estrogen and progesterone, and research has shown that the high fat and hormone content in milk, cheese, and all the rest of the dairy products can increase risk for breast, ovarian, and prostate cancers.3
Cows aren’t designed to be walking the earth as milk-machines; they produce enough milk in order to feed their calf and then, just like human mothers, their milk production stops. Dairy cows are artificially inseminated every year for in order to keep their production going for, not their baby calf to grow strong and healthy, but for human consumption. Dairy cows spend most of their life pregnant and being milked and at around the young age of 5 they are sent to the slaughterhouse.
It may not be on the label but that cow’s milk that’s so heavily marketed to the public contains large amounts of estrogen, progesterone, and insulin-like growth factor-1. Drinking cow’s milk affects sexual maturation of prepubertal children,4 increases risk of breast, prostate, and ovarian cancers,5 and may play a big role in the development of type I diabetes in young children.6 And dairy is pushed on kids?
Do you struggle with acne? Ditch dairy and you’ll most certainly notice a difference! The hormones in dairy play a huge role in acne.
Sure, we’ve been drinking milk from other animals for 10,000 years now but that doesn’t mean that humans are correct on that maneuver. Cow’s milk is (still) not designed for humans, and milk of any kind isn’t meant for consumption after weaning. Did you know that 70% of the world’s population is lactose intolerant?7
Lactase is the enzyme that breaks down lactose, the milk sugar. After the age of weaning, our bodies stop producing lactase. Why? Because we’re done weaning, we shouldn’t still be at the breast drinking milk! Especially not milk of another species. It’s actually a mutation that allows humans to continue to produce lactase into adulthood. That’s right, being lactose intolerant as an adult is normal and being able to consume cow’s (or human) milk without sickening ourselves to some degree is due to a mutation.
“What about osteoporosis? Don’t you have to worry about that since you don’t drink milk?” my friend countered after I told him soy actually lowers risk of breast cancer. The milk-mustached commercials we watched as children made it seem that calcium was exclusively located in a tall glass of cow’s milk. Calcium is found in all sorts of plant foods: nuts, seeds, beans, lentils, cereals, leafy greens (especially kale), broccoli, and nut milks, just to name a few. One cup of my soy milk is a whopping 30% of my daily intake of calcium, and the rest of my day is filled with beans, greens, and whole grains.
“Huh,” my friend grunted after our “foodie” talk, both of us gazing at the mountains beyond. I’m not sure if he believed me or not, but at the age of 70 I don’t think I’ll get him to change his mind on anything.
The end of pizza?
When most people think of pizza, nachos, enchiladas, it doesn’t seem complete without the cheese. What’s the point of a pizza without cheese? Before I completely ditched cheese, I started experimenting with making pizza without it. Just to see what happened. Turns out, it’s actually delicious! If a pizza needs to be drowning in cheese in order to make it taste good, then the toppings are all wrong. The key is in the toppings and sauce: if your pizza is heaped with thrilling ingredients that compliment each other then you don’t even notice that the cheese is missing. The cheese can also mute flavors, so I find pizza sans cheese is actually more flavorful!
I was out on the town the other night at a great little local pizza and brewery joint and they have a vegan pizza on the menu. It was the second time I’d ordered the Captain Planet and I was not disappointed. I had a bite of the other pizza, carefully avoiding the bacon pieces and nibbling the end that just had cheese and arugula. Two things happened: first, the bacon flavor (let’s be real, it’s grease) leeches into every bite no matter how careful you are, and second, the cheese was too rich. In just a couple of bites I felt like the cheese was overwhelming, it was like chewing a wad of oil. I was done. With my curiosity satisfied that the grass wasn’t greener on the other side, I happily turned my attention back to Captain Planet.
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed, leave me a comment! 🙂
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1374738/#:~:text=beta%2DCasomorphine%2D7%2C%20a,leukocytes%20of%20healthy%20adult%20volunteers.
- https://www.pcrm.org/good-nutrition/nutrition-information/health-concerns-about-dairy#:~:text=Milk%20and%20other%20dairy%20products,%2C%20ovarian%2C%20and%20prostate%20cancers.
- https://www.pcrm.org/good-nutrition/nutrition-information/health-concerns-about-dairy#:~:text=Research%20has%20linked%20the%20high,of%20dying%20from%20the%20disease.
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19496976/#:~:text=Background%3A%20Modern%20genetically%20improved%20dairy,amounts%20of%20estrogens%20and%20progesterone.
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4524299/#:~:text=Estrogens%20in%20milk%20and%20milk%20products&text=Very%20early%20studies%20showed%20that,17%CE%B2%2Doestradiol%20(86).
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1173447/#:~:text=It%20could%20be%20that%20in,1%20diabetes%2C%22%20they%20concluded.
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29999504/#:~:text=About%2070%25%20of%20the%20adult,surface%20of%20the%20intestinal%20microvilli.
For almost all of my adult life , cheese was a staple of my diet . Grilled cheese sandwiches , pasta with cheese , scrambled eggs and omelets with cheese , and pizza MUST have lotsa melted cheese all over it . And , sometimes I would carve a thick slab of cheese off the big brick of cheese and eat it like a candy bar . Yummmy ! ! ! I became a vegan in October of 2019 . And I have never looked back , except I missed cheese , in all of it’s glory . However, after reading The Cheese Trap book , I became aware of how insidiously bad cheese is for your health ! This information pretty much curtailed my desire to eat cheese .
I read The Cheese Trap around the time that I quit cheese and it only reinforced that I’d made the best decision for health, ethical, and environmental reasons! What a great book, thanks for mentioning that — I’m going to do a mention in my blog post about that book!
I didn’t think that it was possible when I was hooked on cheese but now that I’m on the other side I can enthusiastically say that life is SO MUCH BETTER without it! The change is blaring and I can thank Dr. Neal Barnard on the Exam Room Podcast for changing my perception! I should add that into my blog post, also!