The Big Cheese

Okay, so I ate about a 2 ounce portion of grass-fed raw milk Colby cheese from nearby Pennsylvania yesterday. I have to admit, it tasted great, and I certainly have yet experienced no ill effects. In fact, it may be due to the fact that I was ending a long fast with the cheese-containing meal, but I felt the sense of my brain and body being populated with nutrients it had been starved for, much like I've read about in accounts from vegans and vegetarians when they "relapse" into eating proper foods. And raw milk cheese has that bitter/sharp taste that really makes you appreciate that you're eating something real, that prevents you from eating it by large mouthful like you might a block of Cracker Barrel Vermont Sharp White. It really was enjoyable with a small handful of raw almonds. One or two more days, and I'll run out of raw milk, grass-fed Colby.

I have been debating whether to add back raw milk non-grass-fed next or grass-fed pasteurized. Here are my thoughts:

Raw milk is probably better from a digestive/immunological standpoint. The heating of pasteurization kills some of the good micro-organisms along with the feared, deadly bad ones.

On the other hand, the nutrition value of grass-fed is likely superior. I think that with plenty of fermented products in the diet, I may be able to handle pasteurized dairy without any trouble. Ultimately, I think I will incorporate this into my diet more often than raw milk/non-grass-fed, but I'm thinking for the sake of the experiment, that it should probably come afterwards, just so that I'm adding things in ascending order of potential for digestive/immunological difficulty.

The next dairy category for inclusion will be full-fat, fermented dairy which is neither explicitly grass-fed nor made of raw milk. (e.g. Full-fat Greek Yogurt). The long term goal will be to minimize (or, at least to keep reasonably low) protein and sugar from dairy in general, due to the tendency of dairy to cause higher secretions of insulin than other sources of the same categories of macronutrient. I'll definitely be careful about sprinkling anything with additional sugar content on my fatty Greek Yogurt simply because I don't want to add sugar to already insulinogenic protein sources.

By that point, I'll probably be dying for some grass-fed butter, which I won't worry much about, because protein and sugar content are negligible. I do plan to add heavy cream to my coffee (although the fauxconut version I've been using is not bad at all), but in very small quantities, and with negligible protein contribution.