To eat cheese as a vegan?

Also this... if you're going to eat cheese, get some M&S Cornish Cruncher and some crackers and thoroughly enjoy it!

Your baby needs something in those triangles so eat for your baby.

I reminded of when Phoebe was pregnant in friends and the babies wanted meat so Joey went vegi so there would still be the same number of animals killed.

For me it is the ethics of real life. Jews and Muslims are allowed to eat foods that are normally off limits if it is an emergency.

Many people accept vaccines that have been grown using eggs or contain animal products. People who don't drink are usually OK with an alcohol swab before an injection.

My vegan friend says she knows a few people who are ‘cheegan’. Nothing animal based at all, except cheese.

Yes, and goat's cheese is low in lactose.

I honestly can't tell the difference with some vegan cheese now

The mcplant in McDonald's just tastes like any other burger to me

Vegan mac and cheese tastes like any other now

Pizzas with vegan cheese taste the same to me

If you taste a difference I reckon it's a craving specially for something the cheese has in it not the cheese as such

However, just eat the cheese if you want

I wanted to eat a rug pregnant... the colour of it matched a food that when I found it was the same shade as the rug became better than chocolate 😂

You'll be lactose intolerant for sure. It's not an allergy. Either take lactase tablets or just eat a teeny bit of cheese to start and build it up.

Tell that to my body. I can't eat any dairy unless I take the enzyme or it is explicitly processed to be lactose-free. 🤷‍♀️

I don't really want to start a debate on here - but you can be malnourished on any diet. Speaking from my own experience, I was absolutely malnourished growing up. Raised on an omnivorous diet but my parents knew nothing about nutrition and didn't care to learn. Lunches would be a sandwich, crisps and chocolate. Typically ate one vegetable a day at dinner time (usually peas). Sometimes it would just be super noodles and no veg at all. Went to uni and it got worse if anything as I was trying so hard not to spend money so probably underate.

Vegan now for four years and my skin, hair and nails are healthier than they've ever been and I'm no longer told I look pale and anaemic. I've also had no trouble putting on muscle since joining gym classes after lockdown.

That's not just from being vegan though, of course. It's from eating a variety of fruit, veg, healthy proteins, fats, etc. I think it should be everyone's responsibility to learn about these things for the benefit of their kids, no matter whether they follow a vegan diet or an omnivorous one.

OP, it's a dietary choice, not a religion.

Eat the cheese and then choose what you want to do when the cravings go.

Humans are not perfect. Whoever expects us to follow anything to perfection is unrealistic. You can be vegan and occasionally eat something non-vegan, whatever the frothing-at-the-mouth obsessive people say.

Cheese - hard cheese anyway - doesn't contain lactose though. So usually people are ok with cheese.

Milk and yogurt are different.

Nothing the OP has posted indicates she preaches or judges 🤷🏼‍♀️ I very rarely see a preachy or judgy comment from a vegan and yet I frequently see comments judging vegans, or accusing vegans of preaching and judging!

Anyway, OP. In my last pregnancy the only thing I could eat was cheese sandwiches. I wasn't vegan then but I am now. I wonder if I'd feel the same if I got pregnant now? If I did, I don't think I could fight it, anything else made me sick. Pregnancy does such strange things to us. Do what you feel you've got to do. You can always go back to fully vegan afterwards if you wish.

The WHO is full of shit and vulnerable to political sway, so no, don't listen to them but listen to bloody obvious common sense.

My children go to a bit of a 'hippy school, and in my son's class there are a handful of vegan kids. I can absolutely 100% tell you those children are malnourished. They all look ill, pale, dark bags under their eyes and are really low energy.

Forcing your children to be malnourished based on your own ideology is cruel and stupid.

EAT WHAT YOUR BODY IS ASKING FOR.

Jesus christ, have some faith in you biology and listen to what you need, don;t fucking listen to hipsters on the internet. We're not herbivores, we have evolved over hundreds of thousand of years to eat animal products, and starving your body of what is needs does absolutely fuck all in helping anything. ESPECIALLY when you are trying to build the most precious thing inside yourself - your baby.

Go eat some cheese or dairy, but fuck the triangles off, get some really high quality organic stuff, and enjoy. xx

YOLO eat the damn cheese! 🧀

Definitely do be careful with dairy as well though. I've had what I think was probably contaminated coffee a couple of times since going vegan and was violently ill afterwards. 😱

I'm vegan too and wouldn't judge you having the cheese personally.

(I don't think being judgemental or too all or nothing is particularly helpful either, although it might be best to keep it to yourself if you're still vegan, just to avoid any mixed messages.)

I say this as someone who, back when I was still only pescatarian and training for a 10k, started massively craving chicken out of nowhere. I wasn't sure what to do but ultimately ended up having it a few times as I figured my body was telling me something. I never told anyone though. I later realised I just had a really crappy diet 😅and wasn't getting what I needed, and once I had consulted a nutritionist at the gym and started eating better I never had those cravings again, even after I started training much harder for a longer race. So I really do believe in the whole deficiencies leading to cravings thing. I imagine being pregnant puts even more demands on your body than just exercising too!

If you do want to try a possible vegan solution that could satisfy cheese cravings, Rachel Ama's tofu and chive spread recipe is really good and easy to make. Won't taste like the triangles obviously, but as long as you use a calcium-set tofu like Cauldron then it'll be really high in calcium, there are cashews in there as well so a double dose of protein and also fats, nutritional yeast for B vitamins etc. Tastes really good on a toasted bagel as a snack. 🙂

The Cathedral City vegan cheese is really good too if it's purely the taste you're missing - but I don't think any sort of pre-made alternative is going to have the same kind of nutritional profile.

I am a vegan and I ate cheese by mistake once. It took me a long time to veer far from a loo.

If you're craving cheese, could you have something equally as pungent/flavoursome? Hummus, nutritional yeast? Something salty and fatty? But ultimately, if you want cheese and cheese only, a couple of bits of it doesn't make much difference in the great scheme of things. You won't be a vegan though. You could always decide you'll be a vegan from X date in the future.

If you haven't eaten dairy for 5 years, you'll probably be lactose intolerant by now. So you need to choose low lactose cheeses - there are lots of them, so not a big problem.

Re the intolerance thing - it’s absolutely true. I cut out dairy for 2 years due to breastfeeding a child with a milk allergy. When I reintroduced dairy I had a few issues with loud tummy noises/gurgling and runny poo. Even 4 years in my lactose digestion is not what it was. Tbh, I had no idea this would affect my lactase levels and cause prior to reintroduction of dairy. Take it easy!

Marvellous. If you can't have a bit of what you fancy when you're building a whole human being, it's a sad life.

I had a huge sweet tooth while I was pregnant, the opposite of my usual tastes. Out on a day trip one day my mum steered the whole family into yet another tea shop because "she's wittering on about having cake again". I wasn't supposed to overhear but it was quite touching really 😁

YWNBU at all to eat cheese.

YWBVVVU to make some godawful tasteless crap like dairylea your first taste of cheese in years. Go for a nice cheddar or another hard cheese of your choice - as pp say hard cheese is lower in lactose than soft cheese.

I havent eaten poultry in for ever - partly for moral reasons (too lazy to go full vegan im sorry!) and then i hated the taste. However, both pregnancies, with DD and now, i could eat chicken all day long. Couldnt bear to be around it post birth last time.

Eat the cheese - especially in the early weeks if you feel sick, just give in to what your body wants (theres a science behind it) and blame the cheese loving genes!

This particular baby seems to be partial to cheesecake too... highly recommend indulging if you're going to allow soft cheese :)

And I frequently cut our diary for my skin for sometimes over 2 years, always been fine tummy wise when ive eaten it :)

In the nicest possible way, noone except you cares that you are vegan, so if you are craving the cheese, eat the cheese.

I think talking to your midwife would be a good idea. Cravings can be a sign of something your body needs. It is perfectly acceptable to abandon the vegan diet for your and your baby's health.