Can You Eat Cheese on a Plant Based Diet?

You’ve come here to see if cheese is considered part of a plant-based diet.

At one point, I was wondering the same thing on whether eating cheese could be considered as part of a plant-based diet. Here’s what I learned when I began to look more into this subject.

It was somewhat confusing because you get multiple answers on this. You can make your own interpretation based on your own values. 

Is Cheese Considered Part of a Plant-Based Diet?

Columbia University Irving Medical Center (1) even stated that you can eat beef, fish, eggs, poultry, and dairy products, but you would consume them in a much lower amount.

The emphasis must always remain on plant-based foods, however, with it consisting of about 60% of your diet. Plant-based means that you emphasize plants, but you don’t necessarily cut out meat or dairy products entirely. 

Not everyone agrees with that perspective and some believe that you need to cut out all meats and dairy products. Veganism is always a plant-based diet but the plant-based diet is not always vegan. 

When you’re on a plant-based diet, you largely focus on eating plants, but you don’t necessarily only eat plants. It’s just a large part of your diet. 

Being plant-based allows you for more freedom, and it’s okay if you eat meat or cheese once in a while, whereas if you’re a vegan and you eat meat, eggs, or cheese, you fail as soon as you eat it. This can leave you feeling bad. 

Eating cheese may not be 100% plant-based but the main goal here is largely plant-based unless you’re stricter about how much you eat.  

Try Some of the Vegan Cheeses

Some of this comes down to your own lifestyle choices, and if you’d prefer, you could also eat vegan cheeses. This would be considered as totally plant-based, depending on what the cheese is made from.

Some great vegan cheese brands you can try include:

Unfortunately, some people have had bad vegan cheese, and they say they’ll never try it again. I would encourage you to try a couple of different brands to see which one works best for you. 

When you’re plant-based, however, you don’t necessarily need to eat vegan cheese, but this depends on your own values.

For example, maybe you’d prefer it since it’s more ethical. 

Harvard (2) is another example of a school that talks about how the plant-based diet doesn’t mean you’re a vegetarian or a vegan. For that reason, you aren’t bound by being unable to ever eat meat or dairy products. What plant-based means is that the most of what you choose will come from plant-based foods. 

Some people will be 50% plant-based, whereas others will eat a diet that is 90% to 100% plant-based. For some, 100% may not be the most optimal choice because they feel hungry all the time. 

When you feel hungry all the time, this is a warning sign in veganism, and you should add some meat—people have been taken to the hospital in cases where they felt hungry all the time. This is why you need to listen to your own body. 

Establish Why You Want to Be Plant-Based

For that plant-based person, you could eat cheese without a problem since it won’t raise ethical problems. You also have the type of person who goes plant-based for ethical reasons, and for that person, you may want to choose a vegan cheese. 

If you dislike one vegan cheese, don’t give up. Try some of the other choices since some will taste better than others. 

FINAL THOUGHTS

You see mixed opinions on whether a plant-based person can eat cheese on the internet, but I think as long as you aren’t vegan, you can eat cheese without a problem. 

Harvard and the Irving Columbia Medical Center both confirm that a plant-based diet is not the same as being a vegan or even a vegetarian.

You could be 70% plant-based, or you might be 90% with some cheese and meat mixed in for the other 10%. 

While someone may struggle to go totally vegan, maybe they can go plant-based, or maybe their lifestyle would fit better with vegetarianism. 

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