Why I don’t eat dairy

If you were told you had to give up dairy, how would you react? Could you do it? What would you miss the most? Do you know how you would replace it? In this podcast, I share with you how and why I replaced dairy with other plant based foods. Giving up cheddar cheese was something I thought I would never be able to do, but I am now 10 years cheddar free. 

In the podcast 

I will cover why lactose is hard to digest 

why I choose not to eat dairy 

what somatic cells in dairy are 

how I like to use the term replace, rather than give up 

how I thought giving up cheese would be something that could never happen

how I now think I couldn’t live without tahini 

Links mentioned in the podcast  

for the cashew cream recipe www.veets.com.au/10 

for the cashew cheese recipe www.veets.com.au/15 

for my story on giving up dairy www.veets.com.au/1

https://www.veets.com.au/vegan-foundation-cooking-course  Check out the vegan foundation cooking course, where you can take your plant based cooking to the ultimate level. 

Becoming a vegan chef offers so many opportunities to showcase how incredibly delicious and healthy plant based food can be. 

https://www.veets.com.au/vegan-chef-training

For full show notes go to www.veets.com.au/29

Hope you enjoy this podcast 

Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

Follow Veet on https://www.facebook.com/VeetKarenVegancookingandnutrition/

Hope you have a delicious week

With gratitude Veet 

https://www.veets.com.au/vegan-chef-training

Ad for sensational eBook

https://mailchi.mp/veets.com.au/healthyfunsensationalebook

Transcript

Introduction

So many people tell me they couldn’t be vegan because they would have to give up dairy.

And others tell me, they have been told they need to give up dairy in order for them to be healthy again. Dairy is a hard one to give up and I don’t actually like the term giving up, I see it as replacing it.  There are so many alternatives out there these days to make replacing dairy a whole lot easier. Most people think that those alternatives are unhealthy, but I am going to bust that myth over the next two podcasts. In this podcast, Number 29 I am going to share with you why I don’t eat dairy, how I managed to replace dairy and how that has made me feel.

Reasons why I don’t eat dairy

I was the biggest fan of cheese, I ate it every day and thought I would never be able to give it up, I thought my life wouldn’t be worth living if I didn’t eat it.  I thought my business would fail if I didn’t include dairy. But 10 years on I am still alive and feel my life is really worth living for, have a thriving business and I haven’t eaten dairy for over a decade. 

In this podcast I talk about why I don’t eat dairy, what dairy is better to eat than others and what I do instead of eating dairy.

My decision to give up dairy, like I mentioned in podcast #1, was the realisation that dairy was making me feel nauseous, and I also knew there were equally delicious alternatives out there, but I had not fully explored them yet.

I hadn’t drunk milk for decades, never had it in tea, had used soy milk since I had become an adult and coffee with milk seemed ridiculous to me. I had watched a barista fill a 10th of the cup up with coffee and then nine-tenths with milk. This seemed to be an insane amount of milk to be drinking.

We didn’t grow up with butter, so I rarely cooked with it and never spread it on bread or toast.  I didn’t like yoghurt as it smelled like vomit.

But my downfall was cheese.

It was my crutch. When anything became remotely stressful, you would find me in the fridge reaching for the cheddar and slicing off big hunks of the stuff.

I felt instantly gratified, then horrified yet again that I had pigged out in this way, just to try to make myself feel better. I felt worse about myself but found it increasingly difficult not to do it.

Replacing Dairy seemed like it would never happen for me. 

But then I started to hear alarming health facts. 

Dairy being the top source of saturated fat, studies show it contributes to heart disease, type 2 diabetes and Alzheimer's disease. 

Infants produce the enzyme lactase which breaks down lactose found in dairy, but 68% of the world's adult population loses the ability to produce lactase after they have been weaned off breastfeeding. If there was no enzyme to break lactose down, where was the dairy ending up in the body. This was so alarming for me.

Many people end up with stomach pain, diarrhoea, IBS, and a whole range of problems which could so easily be solved by eliminating dairy from their diet.

Studies are now coming out to show that dairy has little or no link to preventing bone fractures and studies also showed that, in men, the more milk they consumed, the more likely they are to have bone fractures.

Dairy can cause acne. This was not the case for me, but I did suffer from dermatitis as a child.

Then the alarming reality that, along with milk, there comes pus. This has often been touted as not true by the dairy boards, but you only have to think about what happens to udders or our own breasts when breast feeding. There is a huge chance of cows contracting mastitis, an infection caused when breast feeding or being milked. With this infection comes somatic cells (pus).

It is estimated there is a drop of pus in every cup of milk. 

So with that Cadbury’s bar of chocolate, where there is a cup and a half of milk in every block, there is also a drop and a half of pus.

Because mastitis is common, dairy industries have pushed to keep an allowable somatic cell count in milk.

The USA is one of the highest in the world and Australia has no limit on the amount of somatic cell count.  

Now, if I can’t convince you to replace dairy – and that is not what I am trying to do here, I am just outlining why I don’t eat dairy. But if you do want to cut down, or want to eat a better form of dairy, then the only dairy that is better for not contributing to health issues is yoghurt and cheese, as they are fermented.

So ok, if you would like to replace at least some of the dairy in your diet, how can you do that?

There was a rumour going around that cheese contained caesine, which is as addictive as heroin. It sounded good, and I thought that may be why I couldn’t stop eating the stuff, but it is actually a myth. 

Caesine is not addictive – but what is addictive is the umami flavour that a lot of products have.

Umami is more commonly understood in the west these days, but for those who don’t know, it is the taste that wants you to keep on eating that food again and again.

MSG has umami for example, but so does meat apparently, and cheese definitely does, and chips with too much salt or sugar does too.

In the world of vegan food, there are some foods that have umami for certain people, 

liquid smoke does, 

fermented cashew cheese, 

smoked paprik,a 

tempeh – not for everyone but for many, 

and for me, tahini with lemon and salt does – this now has the same effect on my taste buds as cheddar used to.

When I eat tahini sauce, I could go on eating it until I burst.

Many people substitute vegan cheese for dairy cheese and for them it works, for me it didn’t.  For so long the only vegan cheese that I could eat was the spreadable cashew cheese – this worked well for me as a sub, but any shop bought cheeses, especially cheddar, were rank to me and they didn’t come anywhere near as close, so I just stopped having them and didn’t think about replacing cheese anymore with vegan cheese – I went on another path.

Well, some things I did replace, like for like – for example, creamy pasta sauce – I made pecan cream instead of dairy cream.

And milk in cakes. I used soy milk and butter in cakes. I used my own fermented butter.

But for cheese, I just decided nothing would match up to dairy cheese for me, so I substituted with other things, tahini sauce being one of them.

And for toastie sandwiches, I had hummus, and I know people say nothing beats cheese oozing out of a toastie – and I say it may not beat it, but it sure does come close when I have hummus oozing out of my toastie – especially if I have made the hummus myself.

Then there is pizza. That is a big one, and parmesan – what the heckfire do we do there – and then things like potato bake and blue vein cheese 

Well, I actually have lots of suggestions for you, as I asked people on my mailing list what meals they would miss if they had to give up dairy, and I have pages of answers – some very similar, so I will be going through suggestions on replacements for those meals in the next podcast – podcast 30.  In the vegan foundation cooking course and vegan chef training, over the years, we have made many incredible replacements for dairy, so I will also be sharing those in the next podcast too, so you want to keep a look out for that.

For this week’s recipe 

Oh before I go onto that. 

In podcast 15 is my delectable cashew cheese recipe 

and in podcast 10 there is cashew cream   

Right now I am sharing cashew sour cream as so many people said they couldn’t live without that. 

1 cup soaked cashews

½ cup water 

¾ tsp salt 

1 to 2 tbsp apple cider vinegar or lemon juice

Blend everything in a blender until ultra smooth.

FCT – fun cooking tip

Think outside of the box when replacing cheese with something – think about something else that has your taste buds all a jitter – for me it is tahini or tempeh. 

For others, it could be peanut butter. 

Try different things to see how they rate compared to cheese, even if they are nothing like cheese.

Miso can be a good one for many – spreading a thin layer of aged miso on your toast can give you an umami sensation (this is definitely not for everyone). 

Strange combo, but mung beans with vinegar or lemon juice is a fabulous replacer for cheddar, for me too. I could eat them by the saucepan full!!!

Oh, wonderful listener. Thank you for listening. And I hope you have a most wonderful week. 

And do subscribe so that you can get the next podcast when it lands, because that's all about what to do to replace cheese. 

So like if you want a cheesy potato bake, what are you going to put in instead? You're definitely not going to put tahini sauce in it. You're going to make a yummy cheesy vegan sauce. 

Bye wonderful listener. Thank you.