PETA Global 2017 Issue 1

Imagination It’s Not Your Addicted You Really Are to Cheese

If all that isn’t enough to put you off cheese, consider the fate of cows on dairy farms. The dairy “[i]ndustry relies on impregnating animals, separating them from their infants, pushing them to produce as much milk as drugs and biology can manage, and killing them as soon as it no longer pays to keep them alive,” Barnard writes. What’s the solution? Giving that “crack on a cracker” the old heave-ho. Barnard suggests eliminating all cheese from your diet for 21 days to break the habit and to give yourself a chance to see howmuch better you feel. What to eat instead? Try mashed avocados, peanut butter, nut butters, hummus, commercial vegan cheeses, or one of the tasty vegan cheese recipes on the following page. “Having put forward his case about how bad cheese is for us and how it smells like dirty socks, human vomit and body odour, Dr Barnard unsurprisingly does not think we should just cut down on cheese, but should ban it from our diets.” – The Times (UK)

T he average American devours 33 pounds of cheese per year. That spells trouble not only for animals on dairy farms but also for our health and the health of our planet. “Some foods are fattening. Others are addicting. Cheese is both – fattening and addicting. And that’s the problem,” explains Dr. Neal Barnard in his new book, The Cheese Trap: How Breaking a Surprising Addiction Will Help You Lose Weight, Gain Energy, and Get Healthy (available for purchase at PETACatalog.com). How does someone become addicted to cheese? When digested, it releases chemicals called casomorphins that make their way to the brain and attach to opiate receptors – the very same ones activated by heroin and other narcotics. Not only does cheese have more calories per ounce than Coca-Cola and more salt than potato chips, says Barnard, it’s also loaded with saturated fat. Take cheddar, for example: Sixty percent of its fat is saturated, compared to 14 percent in olive oil. That kind of bad fat has been associated with heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and an

elevated risk for Alzheimer’s disease. It has been shown that women who consume just one-half to one serving of high-fat dairy products per day have a 20 percent higher risk of dying of breast cancer than do those who eat little to no high-fat dairy products. Cheese spells bad news for men, too: In one study, among men attending a fertility clinic, those who ate larger quantities of it had a sperm count 28 percent lower than did those who ate less than half a serving per day. And tyramine, a compound found in aged cheeses, can trigger migraines.

The Cheese Trap is available for purchase at PETACatalog.com.

12 GOOD (and bad) EATS