Maybe not to anybody else, but it feels like it to me!

For the last 15 years or so I have avoided cow’s milk and products. No cheese, yogurt, cream, nothing. I drink my tea and coffee black. Weak, but black. Only goat butter/yogurt/cheese and sheep cheese, and soya milk on my cereal or to make custard with. I did try goat milk on my cereal but after so long without animal milk it tasted really odd. I also use dairy free spread (Pure) to make cakes, and it seems to make lighter sponges.

I researched very carefully which chocolate I could eat. “May contain milk” is fine. Chocolate would be a huge sacrifice, so I just eat dark chocolate.

Then I was prescribed statins. Well. Oh my days. It’s been two months now. The digestive problems started immediately, then the asthma got worse. It took me about two weeks (!) to recognise that these were the symptoms I used to get with cow’s milk. So I decided to give up sheep and goat dairy too. The difference was noticeable within a couple of days, and I feel so much better now. My tummy problems have just gone away and I don’t need my blue inhaler at all. Hubby does all our cooking (I bake cakes and stuff when I can) and once a week we have a cheese vegetable bake. He has cheese sauce, I have grated goat/sheep cheese, and it is grilled. For some odd reason, that makes a difference, and so far it seems that I can tolerate grilled dairy (but not cow’s stuff) once a week. Strange that I don’t miss eating cheese, because it’s one of my favourite foods, but probably the fact that I feel so much better now has mitigated against that.

Soya is a staple in our house, both milk and yogurt. I have just ordered a yogurt maker, some dairy-free starter (at least I think that’s what it is – probiotic tablets I can just break open and add to the mix . . .) and have discovered that we have cornflour in stock anyway. Very excited. I had a yogurt maker back in the day and used cow’s milk. We flavoured them with jam. Nom. Nom. Nom. Fingers crossed it all works.