It may sound Cheesy, but...

I know I've been away for a minute, working, researching and what not. When I initially became vegetarian about five years ago, I intensely ate cheese (and lots of simple carbohydrates) within the first year or so. When I finally cut out cheese, I noticed how I didn't have phelgm in my throat making it easier to breathe and just feelin' lighter in my stomach. Also, being a fan of mac and cheese, I can still enjoy it with nutritional yeast, which I refer to as cheese powder.


After checkin' my righteous brother C'BS blog on Cheese I had post this, check this out:

An excerpt from Breaking the Food Seduction: The Hidden Reasons Behind Food Cravings – and 7 Steps to End Them Naturally by Neal Barnard, M.D.


Opiates on a Cracker: The Cheese Seduction

What do you think of when you think of cheese? Do you conjure up a picture of hot pizza with gooey mozzarella dribbling from each slice? Or do you think of a baguette and goat cheese? Brie and a glass of wine? Do most of your meals have some form of cheese or another included? If you answered yes, you are like a great many other people. And chances are, you've been struggling with your weight, too.

Cheese may get 70 percent of its calories from nothing but waist augmenting milkfat and have, pound for pound, more cholesterol than a steak, but it is also one of the foods health-conscious people have the most trouble leaving behind. Some people describe it as vividly as alcoholics remembering their last drink.


What is it about cheese?
That's what Jo, one of our research volunteers, asked. As a child, she didn't especially care for it. But she began eating the occasional grilled cheese sandwich in high school, and bit-by-bit, cheese crept onto her plate: pizza, salad sprinkles, cheesy lasagna, and sometimes slices straight out of the pack. She was especially fond of cheese melted over toast, heated in her toaster oven just to the point where it almost started to burn in spots. It was quick to make, it tasted good, and it filled her up.

Her weight began to be a problem in her late teens and, as the years went by, things gradually escalated. When she arrived at our office our dietitian gave her a scale and asked her a scale and asked her to weigh and record everything she ate. A week later she returned with her list, which read like a cheese advertisement: She had a grilled cheese sandwich for lunch, with 18 grams of fat, and stopped at Pizza Hut for dinner, where two pizza slices packed in another 20 grams. She also had a late-evening snack of Brie and crackers, with another 15 fat grams. That was 53 fat grams from cheese alone in a single day.

But, as seeing the problem was not the same as solving it. As she contemplated life without cheese, she made a list of all the things she might let go first. Her boyfriend, her stereo, her car – she could live without them if she had to. Ditto for French fries, bread, fruits, and vegetables. Chocolate was a tough one, but the truth is, even it did not deliever the satisfaction she got from cheese.


Is Cheese a Drug?

Cheese's attraction is not mainly due to taste or smell, at least not at first. After all, no one ever marketed a perfume, air freshener, or incense that smelled of old socks. Like beer or cigarettes, cheese's taste can even be a bit off-putting at first. Its real lure may be hidden in its mother lode of opiates – dozens of them – whose effects have been surprising scientists in recent years. The smell and taste are secondary. Scientist speculate that, in the same way that people come to associate that taste of an alcoholic drink with the pleasant relaxation that soon follows, we associate the taste of cheese with what really counts, which is what is happening in our brains.

In 1981, Eli Hazum and his colleagues at Wellcome Research Laboratories in Research Triangle Park, N.C., reported a remarkable discovery. Analyzing samples of cow's milk, they found traces of a chemical test are another. Finally they arrived at the conclusion that, in fact, it is morphine. There is not a lot of it. But indeed morphine has been found in both cow's milk and human milk.

Morphine, of course, is an opiate and is highly addictive. So how did it get into milk? At first the researchers theorized that it must have come from the cows' diets. After all, morphine used in hospitals comes from poppies and is also produced naturally by a few other plants that the cows might have been eating. But it turns out that cows actually produce it within their bodies, just as poppies do. Traces of morphine, along with codeine and other opiates, are apparently produced in cows' livers and can end up in their milk.

But that was only the beginning, as other researchers soon found. Cow's milk – or the milk of any other species, for that matter – contains a protein, called casein, that breaks apart during digestion to release a whole host of opiates, called casomorphins. A cup of cow's milk contains about six grams of casein. Skim milk contains contains a bit more, and casein is concentrated in the production of cheese.

A one-ounce slice of cheese holds about 5 grams of casein, and each one of those grams holds millions of individual casein molecules. If you examined one of these molecules under a powerful microscope, it would look like a chain of beads (the "beads" are amino acids – simple building blocks that combine to make up all the proteins in your body). When you drink a glass of milk or eat a slice of cheese, stomach acid and intestinal bacteria snip the casein molecular chains into casomorphins of various lengths. One of them, a short string made up of just five amino acids, has about one-tenth the pain-killing potency of morphine.

What are they doing there? It appears that the opiates from mother's milk produce a calming effect on the infant and, in fact, may be responsible for a good measure of the mother-infant bond. No, it's not all lullabies and cooing. Psychological bonds always have a physical underpinning. Like it or not, mother's milk has a druglike effect on the baby's brain that ensures that the baby will bond with Mom and continue to nurse and get the nutrients all the babies need. Like heroin or codeine, casomorphins slow intestinal movements and have a decided antidiarrheal effect. The opiate effect may be why adults often find that cheese can be constipating, just as opiate painkillers are.

*Cow's milk is actually quite different from human milk. Cow's milk is loaded with casin, which gives milk curds their white color, and very low in whey, the protein that remains in the watery portion after milk curdles. Human breast milk is the opposite: low in casein and high in whey.

**The opiates in milk may be responsible for calming effect of nursing in infants – and perhaps for the addictive qualities of cheese.

It is an open question to what extent dairy opiates can enter an adult's bloodstream. Until the 1990s, researchers thought that these protein fragments were too large to pass through the intestinal wall into the blood, except in infants, whose immature digestive tracts are not very selective about what passes through. They theorized that milk opiates mainly acted within the digestive tract and that they signaled comfort or relief to the brain indirectly, through the hormones traveling from the intestinal tract to the brain.

But French researchers fed skim milk and yogurt to volunteers and found that, sure enough, at least some casein fragments do pass into the bloodstream. They rearch their peak about forty minutes after eating. Other researchers found that, if a breastfeeding woman includes dairy products in her diet, cow proteins actually pass from her digestive tract into her bloodstream and then into her own breast milk in large enough amounts to irritate her baby's stomach, causing colic.

Other fascinating – and disturbing – findings have emerged. Human milk contains casein, too, albeit less than in a cow's milk and in a slightly different form. In studies of women who had recently given birth, Swedish researchers found that opiates from breast milk sometimes pass from the breast into a woman's own bloodstream and then into the brain. Some women with very high levels of these opiates in their blood – opiates that came originally from the casein in their own breast milk – have developed postpartum psychosis. It had long been suspected that this syndrome of confusion, hallucinations, and delusions (symptoms that go beyond the mood changes of postpartum depression, a more common disorder) is not simply due to the stresses of childbirth, the arrival of maternal responsibilities, or the loss of youthful innocence. The fact is, something is poisoning the brain. The Swedish researchers suggested that the "something" might be an opiate released from casein in mother's milk. The point is, casein is as much a drug as a nutrient, and it is a primary ingredient in all milk products, but especially in cheese.

Cheese contains far more casein than is found in milk from either cows or humans. And it holds other druglike compounds as well. It contains an amphetamine-like chemical PEA, phenylethylamine, that we looked at earlier, which is also found in chocolate and sausage. And there are many hormones and other compounds in cheese and other diary products whose functions are not yet understood. Researchers are gradually tearing them apart and trying to understand their biological effects, including their contribution to the cheese craving that is so common.
*
*One recent review identified the following hormones and related natural chemicals in cow's milk: prolactin, somatostatin, melatonin, oxytocin, growth hormone, leuteinizing hormone-releasing hormone, thyrotropin-releasing hormone, thyroid-stimulating hormone, vasoactive intestinal peptide, calcitonin, parathyroid hormone, corticosteroids, estrogens, progesterone, insulin, epidermal growth factor, insulin-like growth factor, erythropoietin, bombesin, neurotensin, motilin, and cholecystokinin.


Is It Good to Break a Dairy Habit?

Let's say you're stuck on cheese. The question is, does it really matter? The answer is a resounding yes. To see why, you don't have to go much further than the bathroom scale. Our volunteer, Jo, decided that, in the interests of science, she could set aside cheese for a limited time. And, of all the diet changes she made, this single step had, by far the biggest effect on the tally of fat grams she kept. And it also made a big difference in her weight. Even without excercising or limiting her calorie intake or meal size, she saw the pounds melt away slowly but surely – on average, about a pound per week, week after week after week.

Here is your payoff when you break the seduction:

Trimming the Pounds and Cutting Your Cholesterol

The whole point of the cheese-making process is to concentrate fat and protein (that is casein), while squeezing out water and lactose sugar. Not surprisingly, a typical 2-ounce serving has at least 15 grams of fat and about 2000 calories – before it even touches your sandwich. When you set the cheese aside you've spared yourself all that fat and all those calories.

Unfortunately, Americans are going in the opposite direction. Dairy industry figures show that annual cheese consumption in the U.S. doubled from fifteen pounds per person in 1975 to thirty pounds in 1999, as I mentioned earlier. That works out to 14,4000 milligrams of cholesterol and 4.5 kilos of fat – that's ten pounds of dairy fat from cheese alone – for every single person in America. If just one of those pounds of fat lingered on your waistline, adding an extra pound to your weight year after year, you could explain nearly the entire weight problem the country is experiencing – that is, the average American is now gaining about 1.5 pounds per year, and our collective cheese fetish may be a big part of the explanation. If you're looking for a simply way to trim your waistline, breaking a love affair with cheese can help enormously.

When you've broken the cheese seduction, you've not only freed yourself from a lot of fat, you've stepped away from the worst kind of fat. Most of the fat in cheese in is saturated, the kind that tends to increase your cholesterol level and raise your risk of artery blockages and heart problems.

In case you're getting fat and cholesterol mixed up, they are actually two entirely different things. Fat is what you find under chicken skin or marbled through a piece of beef. It also what makes milk thick and cheese smooth. Cholesterol, however, comes in tiny particles packed into the cell membranes of all animal tissues. In meat, most cholesterol is actually in the lean portion. Cheese has cholesterol, too, in hefty amounts. There are about 50-60 milligrams of cholesterol in a 2-ounce serving of cheddar or mozzarella. Ounce for ounce, that's as much as you'll find in steak or ground beef. So, when you find other ways to top a sandwich or prepare a casserole, you'll do your body a huge favor.

**Cheese consumption in the U.S. doubled from fifteen pounds per person per year in 1975 to thirty pounds in 1999. That works out to 14,400 milligrams of cholesterol and 4.5 kilos of fat for every single person in America.


Help for Arthritis and Headaches

If you have arthritis or migraines, side-stepping cheese and other dairy products might be just the prescription you need. In 1985, a British medical journal reported a case of an eight-year-old girl with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis whose cause was a mystery until she stopped eating dairy products. The condition cleared up completely. But even a small amount of milk was enough to trigger her symptoms. At the time, cases of arthritis caused by foods were thought to be rare. But systematic studies have shown that anywhere from 20 to 60 percent of typical rheumatoid arthritis cases are linked to diet, and dairy products appear to be the most common trigger.* The problem in this case is not dairy fat – and it is not necessarily an allergy in the usual sense of the word.

The symptoms are apparently a reaction to dairy proteins, so the payoff comes from avoiding both nonfat and full-fat versions
Skipping dairy proteins can help migraines, too. Cheese is a notorious migraine trigger. And some people are allergic to dairy products, which can mean digestive problems, worsening asthma, or other symptoms. If you thought you had to put up with pain or other symptoms, breaking the cheese seduction might bring you a very pleasant surprise.

*Other common arthritis triggers identified in research studies include corn, meats, wheat, eggs, citrus fruits, potatoes, tomatoes, nuts and coffee. For more details, see Barnard ND, Foods that Fight Pain.


Preventing Prostate Cancer

Researchers have set about trying to see what might reduce the risk of various forms of cancer, and it turns out that, in addition to increasing vegetables and fruits and pumping up the fiber in their diets, men can take another good step by avoiding dairy products. Although this finding was unexpected and is obviously surprising, at least sixteen studies have shown it to be true. Among them are two recent and very large Harvard studies that showed that men who generally avoid dairy products have about a 30 percent reduction in their risk of prostate cancer, compared to those who consume them often.

The reason, apparently, is that dairy consumption increases the amount of a substance in the blood called insulin-like growth factor-I (ICG-I), which is an aggressive promoter of cancer cell growth. Recent studies have linked high IGF-I levels not only to prostate cancer, but also to breast cancer.

A second explanation relates to vitamin D. This vitamin is actually a hormone that helps your body absorb calcium from the digestive tract and also has the job of protecting the prostate against cancer. Vitamin D is normally produced by sunlight hitting the skin, and it can also come from the diet. However, these forms of the vitamin are inactive precursors. In order to function, they must pass to the liver and kidneys to be activated by a slight change in their molecular structure.

And this is where dairy products become a problem. As their calcium floods into the bloodstream, it apparently signals the body that, since there is plenty of calcium in the system already, the body does not need to activate vitamin D to try to absorb any more. The result is a substantial drop in the amount of activated vitamin D in the blood. With less vitamin D in the blood, the risk of prostate cancer climbs. Of course, milk often contains some added vitamin D, but it is in the inactive precursor form, and dairy consumption actually suppresses vitamin D activation in the body. In addition, diets rich in animal fat, whether from dairy products or other sources, tend to increase the body's production of testosterone, which is linked to prostate cancer risk.


Cutting Sodium

Cheese is loaded with sodium that comes from the cow's milk it is made from and the additional salt used in the cheese-making process. Two ounces of cheddar cheese contains about 350 milligrams of sodium. Two ounces of Velveeta have more than 800 milligrams, and a cup of low-fat cottage cheese has more than 900 milligrams. Sodium's effect on blood pressure is well known, but more troubling is its role in osteoporosis. Sodium encourages the passage of calcium through the kidneys where it is then lost in the urine. When you set cheese aside, you skip one of the biggest sources of sodium in the diet.

Calcium? Yes, But…

What about the calcium in cheese? Well, you do need a certain amount of calcium for building bones, and calcium has other functions in the body, too. But you do not need dairy products for calcium, as has been amply demonstrated in Japan, China, parts of Africa, and elsewhere where they are not traditionally used. Bone development is perfectly normal, and bone breaks caused by osteoporosis – the thinning of the bones with age – actually much rarer than in the U.S. and Europe. The fact is, there is plenty of calcium in green vegetables, beans, fortified juices and many other foods.

Researchers at Pennsylvania State University found that, in girls in their peak bone-building years – ages twelve to eighteen – getting extra calcium made no difference at all in bone growth. It is a bit like dumping extra bricks at a construction site, hoping that they will become part of the building. They won't. What did make a difference in bone growth, by the way, was exercise. Exercising teens had clearly better bone development than their more sedentary classmates.



Similiarly, Harvard researchers found that, in a twelve-year study of nearly 78,000 women, dairy calcium didn't help bone strength at all. Those who got the most calcium from dairy sources actually had nearly double the hip fracture rates, compared to those who got little or no dairy calcium. Advertisers have tried to capitalize on the myth that dairy products – or calcium in general – prevents bone breaks, but scientific studies have clearly shown that greatly increasing your intake of calcium – from dairy products or any other food – does little or nothing for the bones.

Other factors do make an important difference, however. Exercise is key. And vitamin D – from sunlight or vitamin supplements – also helps keeps bones' inner collagen matrix. And it is important to understand that osteoporosis is not a condition of inadequate calcium intake, for the most part. Rather, it is a condition of overly rapid calcium loss. It is accelerated by sodium (salt) and animal protein in the diet, smoking, and other factors. But adding extra calcium, either from dairy products or supplements, is largely ineffective at preventing or slowing it.

So, you can feel good about breaking the cheese seduction. You'll say good-bye to a lot of fat and calories, and you'll do your body many other favors in the bargain.


The Dairy Pushers

If cheese and other dairy products present so many health problems, why have they profited from a healthy image for so long? First of all, government programs promoting dairy use began in the early 1900s, long before researchers had taken a serious look at their health effects. Today, hundreds of millions of dollars are pumped yearly into advertising campaigns designed to maintain dairy's image.

In the United States, the dairy industry is intertwined with the federal government in a peculiar relationship. Milk producers and processors pay a portion of their sales revenues into a fund. The Secretary of Agriculture appoints the thirty-six member Dairy Board and the twenty-member Fluid Milk Board to spend this two-hundred million dollar kitty, commissioning advertising campaigns, fast-food promotions, and other schemes through an organization called Dairy Management, Inc.

The USDA Report to Congress on the Dairy Promotion Programs for the year 2000 described how the government and industry worked with Wendy's, Pizza Hut, Shoney's Denny's, and Bennigan's fast-food chains to make sure that cheese prominently displayed in menu items. It details the USDA/dairy industry program to launch Wendy's Cheddar Lover's Bacon Cheeseburger, which singlehandedly pushed 2.25 million pounds of cheese during the promotion period – that works out to 380 tons of fat and 1.2 tons of pure cholesterol in the cheese alone. And, yes, this was an officially sanctioned U.S. government program designed for no purpose other than to push Americans to fatten the industry's wallet.

In 1996, cheese was not a required ingredient in Subway sandwiches. So Dairy Management, Inc., signed a contract with Subway, committing $58,000 to help the restaurant chain promote cheese and include it as a required ingredient in two new sandwiches, the Chicken Cordon Blue and Honey Pepper Melt, anticipating the sale of an extra 70,000 pounds of cheese.

Dairy Management, Inc., also worked with Pizza Hut to promote the "Ultimate Cheese Pizza" – with an entire pound of cheese per pizza – selling five million pounds of it during a six-week promotion in 2000. Burger King jumped in, aiming to push cheese in its chicken and beef sandwiches, and the industry has worked out financial relationships with many other restaurant and grocery chains.

The dairy industry weighs heavily on nutrition policies in the United States. The eleven-person panel that drew up the Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2000 – the blueprint for all federal nutrition programs – included six members with financial ties to the dairy, meat, and egg industries. In addition, the panel kept most its records from public view during its deliberations. Because we believed that this closed-door process violated federal law, my organization, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, sued the Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services in federal court. The court agreed with us and ruled that the panel erred in not opening its workings to public scrutiny.

Dairy industry market analysts are well aware that some people get hooked on cheese. In fact, they have separated cheese buyers into cheese "cravers" and cheese "enhancers." "Cravers" don't stand on ceremony. They eat it straight out of the package or off the block. For them, life without cheese is basically not worth living. Cheese "enhancers" use cheese as an ingredient, sprinkling it on pizza or using it in recipes.

At a "Cheese Forum" held December 5, 2000, Dick Cooper, the Vice President of Cheese Marketing for Dairy Management, Inc., showed slide after slide documenting the escalating cheese consumption in the U.S., and proudly credited the industry's marketing schemes. One slide asked the question, "What do we want our marketing program to do?" and then gave the answer: "trigger the cheese craving." He then detailed industry's plans for pushing cheese in grocery chains, food services, and fast-food restaurants. He concluded with a cartoon of a playground slide with a large spider web woven to trap children as they reached the bottom. The caption had one spider saying to another, "If we pull this off, we'll eat like kings."

The Bottom Line

∙ Many people get hooked on cheese. Like other dairy products, cheese contains casein, a protein that breaks apart during digestion to form opiates, called casomorphins. What makes cheese different – and presumably more addicting – is that it has much more casein than is found in milk, ice cream, butter, or other dairy products.

∙ It is hard to find a more fattening food. Typical cheeses derive about 70 percent of their calories from fat, mostly artery-clogging saturated fat and, ounce for ounce, have more cholesterol than a steak.

∙ If you were hoping for some redeeming health benefits, the fact is, large, well-conducted research studies have shown that cheese and other dairy products do not build strong bones, nor do they slow osteoporosis.

∙ Government-sponsored programs aim to keep you hooked. They have worked with Wendy's, Pizza Hut, Subway, and other restaurant chains to add more and more cheese to menu items, intentionally trying to "trigger the cheese craving." They have managed to boost America's annual cheese consumption from fifteen pounds per person in 1975 thirty pounds in 1999.