Cheese seems to be the favorite food of almost everybody.
People might like or not meat, fish, eggs, broccoli or even cherries but cheese always seems to will the hearts.
Why is that?
Is cheese the perfect food or it is perfectly cunning and tricks us somehow?
Designed to keep us hooked up
Cow milk is a perfect food, for baby calves, that is.
Nature designed milk so that it can turn a small calf into a huge cow in about an year. It is abundant in calories, growth hormones and opiates to keep the calf growing and coming back for more.
Opiates?
You see, nature does not leave things to chance. Nature does not rely on the baby’s appetite to ensure that it eats well.
Cow’s milk has a mild form of morphine (casomorphin) that drugs the calf so that it would keep eating not matter how hungry it was.
Calories galore
Imagine an 86 pound calf at birth. Now imagine a 600 pound grown cow.
It needs to gain 2.5 pounds every day to grow enough so that it is weaned off.
2.5 pounds a day!
That is the caloric punch of cow milk.
Us, humans, need not gain 2.5 pounds a day, not as kids, not as adults. Never!
So milk, it packs a lot more calories that we need.
And in nature, where food is scarce, any animal, including humans, will be attracted to foods that have the most calories.
Well, that means milk is highly addictive.
Enter human ingenuity
Wait, you might say, were we not talking about cheese?
Cheese, naturally, is made from milk.
Cheese is in essence dehydrated and concentrated milk.
Cheese then is more calorie dense and morphine rich per pound that milk is.
And milk in itself is designed to be pretty addictive and calorie rich to begin with.
Then, however, we add salt to the mix.
Fat, sugar and salt are the holy trinity that makes any food irresistible. Think french fries (oil and salt).
So, milk has fat and sugar (lactose) and protein. Now we remove the water, the lactose and some of the protein and then add salt!
We end up with a super concentrated form of fat and salt. Sprinkled with morphine.
It’s not a food anymore, it’s a drug.
Irresistible by design.
No wonder anybody loves it.
Or should we say, everybody craves it?
