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Plant Milk Is Better For Us and the Climate. So Why Do We Subsidize Dairy?
(www.motherjones.com)
this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2023
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Further processing? You mean a tiny amount of added sweetener. That's all that really needs to be added to oat milk.
Plant cheeses are entirely doable, there's an entire industry of nut-based artisan cheeses. Plants can be fermented as easily as dairy, the only things they're missing is the highly addictive opioids, osteoporosis (dairy = bone loss), heart disease, and possibly even things like endometriosis and autoimmune diseases.
I mean, many recipes for home creation also include adding amylase to help keep it from having that slimy texture, and potentially either adding nut milk or adding pulverized nuts to the oats to add some creaminess, and also sweetening it.
You can make plant-based cheese analogs, but they are never so simple as "take milk, add coagulant, stir, separate curd from whey, press curd", which is the basic process for cheese (and for soy milk produces tofu and for many plant milks produces something analogous to tofu).
Casomorphins occur in milk at 200-500 nanograms per liter. For comparison, the most powerful opioid we use (fentanyl) has a standard effective dose of 1000-2000 nanograms per kilogram weight of the patient, and that's 100 times more powerful than morphine. So, if the opioids occurring in milk were as powerful as fentanyl you would need to drink 2-5 liters per kilogram of weight to achieve a dose, which is such a volume compared to, you know, the size of the human digestive tract as to be absurd (especially when you consider that the opioid peptides naturally occurring in milk are not remotely as powerful as fentanyl).
It does have a higher concentration in cheese, mostly because going from milk->cheese is about a 10:1 ratio by weight, but not all the casomorphins from the milk make it into the curd (some are left in the whey), and not all the casomorphins in the curd survive the process (brining, aging, etc as appropriate for the cheese in question). So at the very highest, if you started from the high end of casomorphins in milk, managed to capture all the casomorphins in the curd, lost none of them in processing, and casomorphins were as powerful as fentanyl you'd only have to eat... 20% of your body weight in cheese to achieve a dose.
There aren't a lot of drugs that do anything meaningful to an adult human in the quantities that casomorphins are present in milk given the amounts of dairy humans typically consume. We're talking a scale where the things to compare it to in terms of dose are things like LSD microdosing and botulinum poisoning.
In other words, there's a reason we don't use a dairy-rich diet as a replacement for methadone and it's not that the pharmaceutical industry can't patent dairy.
Do you have any good, reputable studies on this one? Because most studies out there I've seen suggest either no effect or exactly the opposite. By comparison, plant milks tend not to be as high in calcium.