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September 22, 2004

Drink Your Green Tea and Be Fresher than Britney Spears!

My name is Anna and I'm a dairyholic. I'm not quite up to the task of giving up dairy completely, so I've decided to do it one day at a time, like an alcoholic. I really do need some kind of 12-step program to wean myself from cheese. But hey, I figure if I can cut down my cheese consumption to just 2 or 3 days per week, that's better than nothing.

Today I went completely dairy-free. I had a yummy frozen tofu lasagna (Amy's brand -I cannot live without Amy's Organic frozen foods, period. Sadly, one of my favorite Amy's products is the pesto pizza, which has cheese on it). For dinner I had homemade pasta primavera with lots of organic veggies sauteed in olive oil and garlic. It was delicious - carrots, red onions, scallions, artichoke hearts, and tomatoes, tossed together with orecchiete (pasta shells). Of course, I ate too much of the pasta, but it was too good not to.

After dinner I drank two mugs of green tea. Et voila, there was my first vegan day. I didn't miss dairy at all.

Speaking of green tea, I'm downing gallons of the stuff. I think I'm addicted. I've been doing this for about a week. I've known for a while about the health benefits of green tea, but I never made it a regular habit. Now, bolstered by having read about its anti-aging and anti-cancer properties, I've bought myself a proper tea kettle and am drinking at least 4 cups per day, two in the afternoon and two in the evening. I get the decaffeinated kind from Lassen's so it won't keep me up at night.

I hear the newest trend is green tea lattes. Well, I am wondering what a green tea soy latte would taste like. All summer I've been drinking iced soy lattes and I was thinking an iced green tea soy latte might be interesting.

Doesn't that sound like such a typical L.A. thing? It sounds so freaking pretentious, an iced green tea soy latte. But it would be healthy, that's for sure!

Posted by Anna at 04:56 PM | Comments (4)

September 23, 2004

Dairy detox

I just made it through day four of the dairy-free experiment. It honestly isn't as hard as I thought it would be. It helps a lot that there is a big hunk of extremely moldy cheese in the fridge that is disgusting to look at. Every time I open the fridge and see that, my resolve to stay off dairy becomes firmer. I also just read a news article about a woman named Professor Jane Plant who cured herself of advanced breast cancer by cutting out dairy. The article says that within five weeks of giving up dairy, the tumor in her neck "began to itch, then soften, and finally shrivel away." That is amazing since she had been given only two months to live. Check out the link--she has written a book about it, too.

I think I am starting to go through some kind of dairy detox. My skin broke out last night but instead of remaining on my face for a week, the acne is already disappearing. I've read that detoxing can bring things "to the surface" and cause acne, rashes, eczema, etc. And since I'm drinking a ton of decaf green tea, this is probably contributing to the detox. I had already cut out sugar from my diet about a month ago, so really I am eating just about as well as I can. I'm not saying that I'm never going to eat dairy again or that I'm becoming a vegan, but I'm going to try to go as long as I can before eating dairy again.

Posted by Anna at 11:50 PM

September 24, 2004

It's Not Milk if It's Non-Fat!

Okay, weird non-dairy experience today. I was going to meet a friend for coffee at Coffee Bean and because he was going to be there first, I asked him to order me an iced decaf soy latte. So I get there and I take a small sip and something doesn't seem right. I look at what the employee has written on the lid and it says DNFL. That means "decaf non fat latte." So the following conversation ensues:

Me: "This isn't a soy latte!"

Friend: "Yes it is, it's non fat!"

Me: "What?? It's milk!"

Friend: "No, it isn't milk, it's non-fat!"

Me: "Non-fat milk is still milk!"

Friend: "But it's non-fat!"

Me: "Why do you keep saying that? I'm not ingesting dairy of any kind this week. I don't care if it's non-fat or not!"

Friend: "Well, I don't really think there's very much milk in there."

Me: "A latte is like 90% milk and 10% espresso or something. It's all milk."

Friend: "Oh, well, so why no dairy?"

Me: "Because it's bad for me and I'm trying to cut it out for a week or two."

Friend: "Oh."

So I was too upset that he didn't know non-fat milk was dairy and I didn't go inside to get a soy latte. I just sat there and watched the NFL weep in the sun while thinking WTF WTF.

It seems that from a societal point-of-view, giving up dairy confuses people much more than giving up meat. The Dairy Council has done its job.

Posted by Anna at 09:10 PM | Comments (553)

September 26, 2004

Casein and Cheese More Addictive Than Chocolate?

A couple days ago I joked that I was detoxing from dairy and that I needed a 12-step program because I find it so hard to give up cheese. Amazingly, little did I know that cheese has actually been proven to be addictive. This explains why so many people like me find it incredibly difficult to give up cheese. It has been harder for me to give up dairy than cigarettes. I am not joking about that. Perhaps the more shocking thing is that the Dairy Industry has deliberately fed on cheese's addictive quality, with all of us being completely duped. I feel sickened by the following article. I feel cheated, fooled, angry, repulsed, and depressed that people can be so evil. If you can honestly read the last paragraph of this article and not be furious, you are a better person than I am.

So here is an excerpt from an article in the Orlando Sentinel July 13 2003:

Of all the potentially addicting foods, cheese may be the most complex. In research studies using vegan and vegetarian diets to control cholesterol or reduce body weight, most participants soon forget the lure of ice cream, sour cream, and even burgers and chicken. But for many people, the taste for cheese lingers on and on. Yes, 70 percent of its calories may come from waist-augmenting fat, and, ounce for ounce, it may harbor more cholesterol than a steak. But that cheese habit is tough to break.

Why is cheese so addicting? Certainly not because of its aroma, which is perilously close to old socks. The first hint of a biochemical explanation came in 1981, when scientists at Wellcome Research Laboratories in Research Triangle Park, N.C., found a substance in dairy products that looked remarkably like morphine. After a complex series of tests, they determined that, surprisingly enough, it actually was morphine. By a fluke of nature, the enzymes that produce opiates are not confined to poppies -- they also hide inside cows' livers. So traces of morphine can pass into the animal's bloodstream and end up in milk and milk products. The amounts are far too small to explain cheese's appeal. But nonetheless, the discovery led scientists on their search for opiate compounds in dairy products.

And they found them. Opiates hide inside casein, the main dairy protein. As casein molecules are digested, they break apart to release tiny opiate molecules, called casomorphins. One of these compounds has about one-tenth the opiate strength of morphine. The especially addicting power of cheese may be due to the fact that the process of cheese-making removes water,lactose and whey proteins so that casein is concentrated. Scientists are now trying to tease out whether these opiate molecules work strictly within the digestive tract or whether they pass into the bloodstream and reach the brain directly.

(some paragraphs about chocolate addiction snipped)

The cheese industry is miles ahead of them, having gone to great lengths to identify people who are most vulnerable to addiction. It dubs them "cheese cravers," and tracks their age, educational level and other demographics so as to target them with marketing strategies that are tough to ignore. With a $200 million annual research and marketing budget, the dairy industry is not content to have you just sprinkling a little mozzarella on your salad. It is looking for those Americans who will eat it straight out of the package, whatever the cost to their waistlines or cholesterol levels.

At a "Cheese Forum" held Dec. 5, 2000, Dick Cooper, the vice president of Cheese Marketing for Dairy Management Inc., laid out the industry's scheme for identifying potential addicts and keeping them hooked. In his slide presentation, which was released to our organization under the Freedom of Information Act, he asked the question, "What do we want our marketing program to do?" and then gave the answer: "Trigger the cheese craving." He described how, in a partnership with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the dairy industry launched Wendy's Cheddar Lover's Bacon Cheeseburger, which single-handedly 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. A similar promotion with Pizza Hut launched the "Ultimate Cheese Pizza," which added an entire pound of cheese to a single pizza and sold five million pounds of it during a six-week promotion in 2000. The presentation 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."

Posted by Anna at 01:32 AM