No vegan milk is equivalent to dairy, nutritionists conclude

https://www.thetimes.com/life-style/health-fitness/article/plant-based-milk-cows-nutrition-ct7dlbxgl

by josephcsible • 1 year ago

39 35 1 year ago

Soya, oat and almond drinks are only deemed acceptable alternatives if they’re fortified, especially for young children

Adult humans don’t require dairy, most vegan soy and pea milk for children is fortified. Ripple Kids, for example (pea based and fortified).

BizarroLand3• 1 year ago

Honestly, Oat milk is where its at.

Tastes close enough to cow milk, lower in calories, fortified with vitamins, and cheap. Nothing to complain about except that maybe its a bit lower in protein, but the average american diet is not lacking for protein so it all comes out in the wash.

xenospn• 1 year ago

Nobody actually needs to drink dairy. I thought that was already well established.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 1 year ago

Nobody actually needs <specific food>.

Nobody actually needs to eat beans.

subscribed• 1 year ago

I need beans! And potatoes.

southernplaces72• 1 year ago

If you want to classify the quality, nutritional value and usefulness of the many foods we humans eat based on an absolute bare-bones definition of needs, we could all go on an extremely bland but moderately robust concentration camp diet and be more or less okay. Fortunately, food for the most part, among most people isn't so strictly defined by such dogmatic restrictions.

BizarroLand3• 1 year ago

We could live long lives on beans and rice and the occasional vitamin supplement.

Wouldn't recommend it, but its theoretically possible.

miles• 1 year ago

Physician Michael Klaper puts it succinctly[1]:

“We have no more need for the milk of a cow than we do the milk of a dog or a giraffe.”

[1] https://www.doctorklaper.com/dairy-free

someotherperson• 1 year ago

The same Physician Michael Klaper who thinks that switching to a plant-based diet cures Crohn's disease?

esperent4• 1 year ago

Well, maybe he's right.

https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/11/6/1385

southernplaces72• 1 year ago

This is one trite, simplistic and fundamentally mendacious way of phrasing what is in reality a complex adaptive nutritional question that isn't so easily dismissed. People have been consuming animal dairy for many thousands of years. These foods are profoundly useful, and have been since around the dawn of civilization for good reasons.

esperent4• 1 year ago

People have been consuming soy milk for thousands of years too, and almond milk for hundreds of years.

gnabgib• 1 year ago

https://archive.is/Z1jOB

Paper: [SACN and COT assessment of the health benefits and risks of consuming plant-based drinks: summary](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/plant-based-drink...)

.. note there's some UK specific aspects of the study:

Plant-based drinks in the UK that are labelled as ‘organic’ are not allowed to be fortified with any nutrients.
Most plant-based drinks would be classified as ‘ultra-processed’ according to the NOVA classification.

The findings also conclude:

Replacing cows’ milk with almond, oat or soya drinks would result in potential benefits and risks from both a nutritional and a toxicological perspective.

.. so hardly a slam dunk.

esperent4• 1 year ago

according to the NOVA classification.

I have massive problems with the NOVA classification.

For example, anything traditional gets a pass. Cheese? Traditional, so it's not highly processed, even if made in a factory. Oat milk? New, so it's classified as highly processed , even when there's less actual processing happening (talking about mass produced but real cheese here, not the American stuff).

I do get the idea behind NOVA, it's designed to be simple, to statistically improve the diets of people in Europe, and to accept that they won't stop people eating traditional foods so they should ignore them. Overall, trying to have less NOVA food items in your diet is a good start to healthy eating.

However, there's no nuance. It's (intentionally) simplistic. It falls apart when you focus on individual items like this, and it will get used this way.

Many things classified as highly processed, considered individually, could be fairly healthy. Many things not classified as highly processed, considered individually, could be unhealthy.

Statistically, applied to all foods, it should help steer people towards a healthier diet. But when talking about an individual food, you should have a stronger case than "it's NOVA classified as highly processed" before dismissing it.

Scarblac2• 1 year ago

It's a classification proposed by a Brasilian researcher at the university of Sao Paolo, not European. [0]

He noticed a trend of obesity among the poor in the 90s and did statistical analyses to group ingredients into more traditional and more highly processed groups. An ingredient like cheese probably isn't the cause of the obesity epidemic among the poor as it already existed long before it.

I think the main advantage of using Nova is that so many other studies did, so results can be compared. That's an important advantage.

And it's good enough to show health differences between processed foods and traditional foods. There must be something to it, even if it's not perfect.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_classification

Qem• 1 year ago

It appears milk took the crown of villain food that once belonged to eggs, and butter. Curious about what foodstuff will take this crown next once people get tired of maligning milk.

filleduchaos• 1 year ago

The idea that milk alternatives exist because milk is a "villain food" seems rather silly to me. Besides the patently obvious (veganism), lactose intolerance is a well-documented phenomenon and not everyone is interested in lining the pockets of companies like Lactaid.

adrian_b2• 1 year ago

Milk contains mostly 5 components: water, lactose, butter fat, casein and whey protein.

Of these, water does not matter, while lactose and butter fat are at best useless for nutrition and at worst harmful.

Casein and whey protein are the useful components of milk, which you can get separated from the undesirable components as milk protein concentrate (i.e. casein + whey protein) or whey protein concentrate (where butter fat has been removed by centrifugation, then water and lactose have been removed by ultrafiltration and drying).

Some years ago there where some scary claims that "casein causes cancer", but I have read the original claims and all the studies on which they were based, so I could determine that the claims were bogus, because they were based on invalid inferences from the results of otherwise very important studies, which were unjustly blemished by these sensational claims.

The real conclusions of those studies did not contain any information whatsoever about whether casein is good or bad, and their main correct conclusion was that certain kinds of malnutrition have protective effects against cancer. This is not at all surprising, because malnutrition behaves like a mild form of chemotherapy, i.e. it is much more harmful for cancerous cells than it is for normal cells. Unfortunately malnutrition also has bad health effects, so it is not an acceptable solution for avoiding cancer, but a compromise must be made between the risk of cancer and not eating enough essential nutrients.

If health were the only criterion, it would be better to avoid any milk-based products except milk or whey protein concentrates.

However milk and various dairy products, like cream and butter, are irreplaceable for obtaining the best taste in various dishes. I have experimented a lot with replacing dairy with various vegetable milks. While the results were decent, they were never as good as with real milk-based products (and they were also more expensive than with real milk). Still, it is better if such tasty dairy-based food is eaten only infrequently. Eating dairy daily is without doubt a bad habit.

rf15• 1 year ago

while lactose and butter fat are at best useless for nutrition and at worst harmful.

They carry energy, and thus are useful. They would only become harmful if you would produce so much that our bodies, adopted for scarcity, were presented with an excess amount of it over longer periods. And you wouldn't build a society and industry around that kind of production, right? Right?

kgbcia• 1 year ago

Should be rebranded "calcium fortified drinks"

konfusinomicon• 1 year ago

even though there have been many a breakthrough in nut milking technology in recent history, like the ability to tell male almonds from female, and the dual nut milker, which together doubled both output and quality, there are still no vegan drinks that are equivilent to milk

hyeonwho4• 1 year ago

Human infant intestines in the ancestral environment are natively colonized by bifidobacterium infantis, which completely metabolizes oligosaccarides present in human breast milk and outputs highly acidic byproducts. This acid kills most other gut bacteria, allowing B. infantis to consist of 50% of the intenstinal microbiome in healthy infants [1]. Oligosaccarides cannot be metabolized by babies without gut bacteria, but human mothers produce more of them than most other mammals we know of, and the specific oligosaccarides present depend on maternal generics [4]. NICU infants untreated with B. infantis are 5x more likely to fall into sepis as a result of necrotizing enterocolitis[2,3], probably due to increased intestinal permeability to pathogens.

But B. infantis is coevolved for the digestion of human oligosaccarides, and those are specifically genetically coded for in human milk [4]. As a result, "vegan baby formula" or even baby formula without the correct oligosacarides could be a disaster for baby intestinal health, and even cow's milk has a different oligosaccaride profile, and we don't know how adaptable the gut microbes are.

[1] doi.org/10.1038/s41390-020-01350-0 [2] doi.org/10.1542/peds.2004-1463 [3] doi.org/10.1038/s41372-019-0443-5 [4] doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-45209-y

hshdhdhj4444• 1 year ago

Subhead

Soya, oat and almond drinks are only deemed acceptable alternatives if they’re fortified, especially for young children

First sentence

Unfortified vegan milks are “not an acceptable alternative” to cow’s milk

The headline is contradicted twice in the first 2 sentences. WTF.

alextingle• 1 year ago

It's true. No vegan "milk" gives me the runs like cow's milk would.

esbranson• 1 year ago

These fortifications come from petrochemical processes, ie from the oil industry, GMOs, and mining. So reducing animal product consumption is hardly an environmental slam dunk. And apart from soy, of which the US is the biggest producer behind the world's renowned environmentally-conscious producer Brazil, vegan milks are not particularly healthy.

strnjrloops• 1 year ago

Yeah they’re hiding the shift in resource use behind feel good vibes

Thermodynamics. We would not get rid of meat production mess, just make a mess somewhere else to distract

aziaziazi4• 1 year ago

These fortifications come from [...]

Many baby's brewage or powder are also skimmed and re-enriched with fortifiants AWA most cereals and salts. Caw milk has more Calcium and Phosphorus but Soy milk gets more Iron, Magnesium, Fibers and Polyunsaturated Fats. You easily get P from lentils and Ca from green vegetables, without fortifiant.

Milk protein efficiency is 25% [0], this means with 1kg of soy you either get 380g of soy protein or 95g of whey. Accounting for a bio-disponibility of 0.95 the ratio is still 1/3.8! This is so inefficient that a lot is wasted in US and Brazils :

97% of U.S. soybean meal goes to feed livestock and poultry. [1]

0: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/protein-efficiency-of-mea...

1: https://soygrowers.com/key-issues-initiatives/key-issues/oth...

aziaziazi4• 1 year ago

Here's the original report [0]. The writers are SACN and COT. If someone from UK could confirm their reputation, I don't know them but a quick search doesn't inspire confidence:

At least 11 of the 17 members of the Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition (SACN) have ties to companies including Nestle and the world’s largest ice cream producer, Unilever. [1]
More than half the members of the Committee on Toxicology have recent links to the food and chemicals industries and last year it disagreed with the European regulator’s proposal to cut the safe level of BPA [1]

Seems a shame they're paid by public found

0: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/plant-based-drink...

1: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-13838681/nutritio...

2. https://www.bbc.co.uk/contact/ecu/panorama-ultra-processed-f...

No vegan milk is equivalent to dairy, nutritionists conclude

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