but to those doubters i found a good post bob and jen(vegan freak) put up which i thought made some pretty good points. they will expand on it further in their book. the second edition is coming out in october. i recommend it for vegans and non-vegans alike
Though not cheating is easy for a lot of foods, some people find giving up cheese particularly difficult. For us, it wasn’t hard. We just went vegan one day, and didn’t look back, but for a lot of people we’ve talked to, cheese is the lone item that often still has its hooks in them. So many people have complained to us about how hard it was to give up cheese that we almost felt like we needed to set up some kind of support group in the basement of an area church where we served burnt coffee (with soy creamer) and let people talk about how many days cheese-clean they’ve been. Frankly, the whole thing was perplexing for us until we read up on casomorphins, or opioid chemicals that are present in cow’s milk (and by extension, very much present in cheese). Evolutionarily, these peptides probably had the function of creating a positive association between the calf and its mother and her milk. Now, however, humans consume more cow’s milk than calves do, and – improbable though it sounds – those who consume large amounts of dairy products are probably mildly addicted to them. It isn’t like you’re going to get the DTs or have seizures if you give up cheese, but certainly, these opiate effects can help to explain the more than mild cravings that lots of people have. A study underway during the time we were writing this book is looking at how casomorphins work in the human body, operating under the functional hypothesis that because cheese is one of the most commonly craved foods, it may be exerting mild opiate effects on its consumers. If this hypothesis is true the correct solution isn’t weaning yourself from crackcheeese slowly. As we suggest above, that would probably only lead you back to eating more cheese. The right solution is to stop eating cheese now, and to make an agreement with yourself never to eat it again. If you feel tempted to eat it, slide a paperclip over this page, and when you’re on the verge of eating cheese, come back here and remind yourself of these disgusting cheese facts:
Cheese is made from milk, and milk almost always contains pus. You may comfort yourself by thinking that the pus is pasteurized, and certainly, pasteurization will prevent you from becoming ill, but you’re still eating pus. Look at it like this: you could stick a dog turd in an autoclave and render it biologically harmless with significant pressure and heat. Yet, we’re willing to wager that you’d not be anxious to eat it unless you have some very strange proclivities indeed.
Forget about being vegan – most cheeses aren’t even vegetarian. Rennet, a stomach enzyme common to most mammals, is used to make cheese by “digesting” it, leaving behind a solid and a liquid. Rennet is often harvested from the stomachs of cattle in slaughterhouses, and used directly in cheese. Though there are vegetarian rennets synthesized by other means, it is difficult to know which cheeses use vegetarian rennet and which cheeses use the stuff scraped out of the stomachs of slaughtered animals. Yum! Cow stomach excretions obviously go great with pus!
In order for you to have your beloved cheese, someone had to produce the milk to make the cheese, and we don’t mean a dairy farmer. The someone in this case is a nameless dairy cow, identified only by a number and probably an radio frequency identification tag in her ear that helps the slave ownerfarmer track her productivity so he can send her to slaughter once she underproduces. In the larger dairy operations, this cow may never go outside, and she will repeatedly give birth to calves who will be stolen from her almost immediately after they are born. She will live a short and miserable life, and end up as hamburger on the plate of some fast food consumer, all because you could not find the guts up to stop eating cheese or drinking milk. And you say you care about animals?
Beyond being a disaster for cows, cheese is a disaster for you. A cup of diced cheddar has a whopping 532 calories, 385 of which come from fat. That includes 28 grams of saturated fat, which is 139% of amount recommended for total daily consumption by the United States government. And really, do you think those figures haven’t already been manipulated by decades of dairy and meat industry intervention in the government? To all that fat, you can add 139 milligrams of cholesterol and 820 mg of sodium. For comparison, if you decided to reach for a cup of chopped carrots instead, you’d be taking in fewer than a tenth of the total calories (52 calories for the whole cup) and less than 1 percent of the fat (3 calories versus 385 calories) than if you ate the cheese.
Cheese may taste good to you now, but really, like every other animal product, there’s no good reason to eat it. It is bad for you and bad for the animals that have to make the raw ingredients that go into it. Give it up now, call it quits, and go cold tofu. If you can do that, maybe you can come to our cheese-eaters anonymous meetings, sip some bad coffee, and tell us how many days you’ve been clean.
the original post can be found here
