7 ms·

Using “milk” in the name of something doesn’t make an “alternative milk” in any way that doesn’t apply to any other drinkable liquid.

Pharmakon 8y ago
It’s pure marketing, where the reality would be “juice” if we’re being charitable. In a lot of cases it’s water with a hint of X, and a lot of added sugar. All told drinking a lot of anything other than water is probably a bad move, but evidence suggests that if you’re not lactose intolerant, milk is a healthier choice for what you put on cereal. All things being equal, my major issue with alternative “milk” isn’t the semantic debate though. The fact that they’re often high in sugar, low in protein and fat is a bad sign. The fact that many (especially almond milk) are mostly water isn’t promising, and the environmental impact of chugging almond milk should become clear to California within a decade or so. Mostly it’s just another fad (in terms of scale), promulgated by people who should know better, and others trying to sell you their “milks.”
- empath75 8y ago
  Well. Regular milk is also mostly water.
- greglindahl 8y ago
  Cow's milk is mostly water. As for alternative milks being a fad, it's a fad that's more than a thousand years old -- for example, almond milk was important in Europe for meatless Fridays and during Lent. I'm not sure who "should know better" when it comes to religious doctrine affecting food choices.
  - Pharmakon 8y ago
    You’re the second person to latch on to a single sentence fragment, unfortunately without the context about sugar and protein content. As far as religion goes, what percentage of current “alt-milk” consumption do you think is religiously motivated? A rounding error? A rounding error of a rounding error? Less? If you wanted to focus on a single point I made, I’d suggest: All told drinking a lot of anything other than water is probably a bad move....
    - dashundchen 8y ago
      Soy milk has protein and doesn't necessarily have sugar depending on the brand, if you are looking for a response to that. And if we want to talk water usage and environmental impact, any cattle/dairy product is consuming at least order of magnitude more resources and emissions than oats or soy beans.
      - Pharmakon 8y ago
        Soy milk has protein and doesn't necessarily have sugar depending on the brand, if you are looking for a response to that. And if we want to talk water usage and environmental impact, any cattle/dairy product is consuming at least order of magnitude more resources and emissions than oats or soy beans. Oat milk isn’t even a rounding error of total plant “milk” consumption. https://www.statista.com/statistics/693015/dairy-alternatives-global-sales-value-by-category/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/693015/dairy-alternative... Almond dominates by an order of magnitude, and has grown a loooot just since 2013, while soy milk consumption has actually dropped. Worse, it is projected that consumption of almond milk will more than double, while all other types are effectively flat. When we talk about this subject, it’s important to realize that to the first order, we’re just talking about almond milk, a trend which continue into the future.
        dashundchen 8y ago
        And? I'm not sure what your point is. I was pointing out there are non-dairy milks with protein in them. Almond milk still uses less water and way less CO2e emissions than dairy to produce the same volume of milk. Animal agriculture is horrendous for the planet, any increase in non-dairy milk at the expense of dairy milk is a definite win for the environment. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46459714 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46459714 From the BBC calculator, which comes from University of Oxford researcher Joseph Poore, and Thomas Nemecek of the Agroecology and Environment Research Division in Zurich, Switzerland 1 glass (200ml) per serving almond milk daily Over an entire year your consumption of almond milk is contributing 51kg to your annual greenhouse gas emissions. ... 27,042 litres of water 1 glass (200ml) per serving dairy milk daily Over an entire year your consumption of dairy milk is contributing 229kg to your annual greenhouse gas emissions ... 45,733 litres of water 652m² land
  - megablast 8y ago
    Isn’t every liquid mostly water? Even coke is 99% water?
- ScottBurson 8y ago
  If you're concerned about agricultural use of water in California, I would suggest a bigger concern is alfalfa, a low-value, water-intensive crop, most of which gets shipped to China. We are almost literally selling water to China. Almonds, at least, are a high-value crop, meaning that if we found a way to circumvent or invalidate the 19th-century water rights and raise the price of water to farmers, almond growers could pay the higher rates but crops like alfalfa would probably be rendered uneconomic.
  - Pharmakon 8y ago
    High value, low value, the Western U.S. can’t support either. The profitability of the situation isn’t really a factor, it’s the consumption. I’d also argue that people have far more control over what they buy for ‘milk’ than they do over exports to China. Having said that, it’s very much a problem solving itself, with eventual depopulation.
  - greglindahl 8y ago
    Do you have a source for California alfalfa mostly being sent to China? Most places on the Internet say that it's mostly used to feed California dairy cows. And that alfalfa cultivation is changing to higher value crops over time, as farmers take advantage of the value of their water rights.
- lozenge 8y ago
  In my experience they are not that high in sugar. Oatly doesn't add sugar and has about 2g/100ml or 3g/100ml. I looked up a cheap brand with more sugar than almond(2%) and they also had a very similar sugar level of under 3g/100ml. Every one has an unsweetened version on the same shelf as well. This is less than that of milk(without getting into the different kinds of sugar). In comparison, soda is 11g/100ml, juice is 9g/100ml, iced tea is 8g/100ml. Perhaps it is different in the US. I am amazed though, when I see people buying "skinny oat(or whatever) milk". Pretty sure you can achieve the same at home by mixing regular oat milk and some filtered/softened water.
  - greglindahl 8y ago
    Oatly Skinny and Oatly Whole differ in the amount of fat, but have the same carbs, fiber, and protein content. So, it appears to be quite similar to skim milk, which is milk with reduced fat (cream skimmed off), not watered down milk. What amazes me is the strong opinions people have about this topic.
- Cerium 8y ago
  Well, it can't be called juice since almond milk contains no juice. It could be called an almond drink or beverage. The fact is, that both animal milk and almond milk are fat water emulsions with various additives to serve their purpose.
  - Pharmakon 8y ago
    It’s definitely juice. n. A fluid naturally contained in plant or animal tissue: fruit juice; meat braised in its own juices. n. A bodily secretion: digestive juices. n. The liquid contained in something that is chiefly solid. They’re macerated and crushed, their contents mixed with water. Of course by the same token milk is also a subset of juice, of the type “mucosal excretion.”
- PerfectElement 8y ago
  > low in protein and fat is a bad sign. By that standard, human breast milk should be considered unhealthy (0.8%-0.9% protein, 3%-5% fat).
  - gorilla_fight 8y ago
    3-5% fat is actually considered high-fat, for comparison, cow's whole milk is typically 3.25%, low-fat is 1% and skim/non-fat is 0-0.5%. Interestingly, the fat content of milk can vary drastically between species, from Holstein cows 3.6% (popular for high volume milk production, but less fatty), Brown Swiss cows 4.0%, Jersey cows 5.2% (prized for their rich creamy milks), Zebu cows 4.7%, goat 4.0%, up to buffalo 6.9%, yak 6.5%, sheep 7.5%, reindeer 17%, and even fin whale a whopping 42% fat and a similarly staggering 12% protein. (Source: _On Food and Cooking_ by Harold McGee, page 13).
    - Pharmakon 8y ago
      I’m loving your posts, and here’s a fun fact to add, fat content can vary between pregnancies, and there seems to be a difference based on the sex of the fetus, time of day or night, and a bunch of other factors. https://www.imedpub.com/articles/biochemical-differences-in-human-breastmilk-contents-according-to-infants-gender.pdf https://www.imedpub.com/articles/biochemical-differences-in-... Human milk composition is dynamic, and varies between mothers in the same and different populations. Breast milk content was also found to vary diurnally, over a feeding and in some species according to the gender of the breast feeding infant. This study aimed to determine if there are any quantitative differences in the biochemical constituents of breast milk according to the gender of the breast feeding infant. Forty eight breast feeding mothers participated in the study, 24 were breast feeding male infants and 24 were breast feeding female infants. Five ml of breast milk was collected from each mother then analyzed for lipid contents, carbohydrates, proteins and calcium. Carbohydrates, amino acids and calcium concentration were measured using colorimetric test of absorbance. There were significant differences in the concentration of lipids and calcium in breast milk of male and female breast feeding mothers (P-value<0.001 and 0.02, respectively). Our study indicates that breast milk is more dynamic than previously thought and concentration of breast milk contents should not be taken as fixed. This can lead to developing personalized formula feeding specific to the baby’s gender and age and matches his/her growth needs. Biology is damned complex.
- dabbledash 8y ago
  I don’t have any issue with these things as beverages, but cringe when I read mothers of babies old enough to switch off of human milk (or formula) ask “what kind of milk” they should be giving their child. As if almond milk is a “kind of milk” in any meaningful sense.
- gorilla_fight 8y ago
  I prefer this alternative naming by The Onion: https://www.theonion.com/fda-defends-decision-to-reclassify-alternative-milks-as-1827722953 https://www.theonion.com/fda-defends-decision-to-reclassify-... Astute as ever, America's finest news source turns this marketing-driven terminology on its head. This has happened before, industries creating imitation products deceptively similar to the real thing. For example in the early 1900s, states fought back against fake butter, but were ultimately overruled by the Supreme Court: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/people-and-culture/food/the-plate/2014/08/13/the-butter-wars-when-margarine-was-pink/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/people-and-culture/food/t... > Margarine manufacturers, to better appeal to the public, wanted to tint their product yellow; butter producers objected, claiming that yellow margarine, fraudulently masquerading as butter, was a deliberate ploy to deceive the public. (Butter from corn-fed cows is also anemically pale, and is routinely dyed to turn it an attractive butter-yellow; this practice, however, butter makers argued, was simply a cosmetic tweak.) > By 1902, 32 states had imposed color constraints on margarine. Vermont, New Hampshire, and South Dakota all passed laws demanding that margarine be dyed an off-putting pink; other states proposed it be colored red, brown, or black. The “pink laws” were overturned by the Supreme Court (on the grounds that it’s illegal to enforce the adulteration of food) but the ban on yellow margarine remained. (The last hold-out, Wisconsin, only repealed its margarine-color law in 1967.)
  - Pharmakon 8y ago
    That was a really good read, and of course it would be Wisconsin who fought to the end for dairy. Personally I’m not interested in regulating “milk” and the term has been around for a while. I just think it’s worth pointing out the differences, but dying it a strange color is... too far.
InclinedPlane 8y ago
"Soy milk" as a term in the english language dates back to the late 1890s. It's a term that has been in common use for a very long period.
7952 8y ago
It means that it can be used in contexts where milk would usually be used. Like in a pancake or over cereal.

Pharmakon 8y ago

It’s pure marketing, where the reality would be “juice” if we’re being charitable. In a lot of cases it’s water with a hint of X, and a lot of added sugar. All told drinking a lot of anything other than water is probably a bad move, but evidence suggests that if you’re not lactose intolerant, milk is a healthier choice for what you put on cereal. All things being equal, my major issue with alternative “milk” isn’t the semantic debate though. The fact that they’re often high in sugar, low in protein and fat is a bad sign. The fact that many (especially almond milk) are mostly water isn’t promising, and the environmental impact of chugging almond milk should become clear to California within a decade or so. Mostly it’s just another fad (in terms of scale), promulgated by people who should know better, and others trying to sell you their “milks.”

empath75 8y ago
Well. Regular milk is also mostly water.
greglindahl 8y ago
Cow's milk is mostly water. As for alternative milks being a fad, it's a fad that's more than a thousand years old -- for example, almond milk was important in Europe for meatless Fridays and during Lent. I'm not sure who "should know better" when it comes to religious doctrine affecting food choices.
- Pharmakon 8y ago
  You’re the second person to latch on to a single sentence fragment, unfortunately without the context about sugar and protein content. As far as religion goes, what percentage of current “alt-milk” consumption do you think is religiously motivated? A rounding error? A rounding error of a rounding error? Less? If you wanted to focus on a single point I made, I’d suggest: All told drinking a lot of anything other than water is probably a bad move....
  - dashundchen 8y ago
    Soy milk has protein and doesn't necessarily have sugar depending on the brand, if you are looking for a response to that. And if we want to talk water usage and environmental impact, any cattle/dairy product is consuming at least order of magnitude more resources and emissions than oats or soy beans.
    - Pharmakon 8y ago
      Soy milk has protein and doesn't necessarily have sugar depending on the brand, if you are looking for a response to that. And if we want to talk water usage and environmental impact, any cattle/dairy product is consuming at least order of magnitude more resources and emissions than oats or soy beans. Oat milk isn’t even a rounding error of total plant “milk” consumption. https://www.statista.com/statistics/693015/dairy-alternatives-global-sales-value-by-category/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/693015/dairy-alternative... Almond dominates by an order of magnitude, and has grown a loooot just since 2013, while soy milk consumption has actually dropped. Worse, it is projected that consumption of almond milk will more than double, while all other types are effectively flat. When we talk about this subject, it’s important to realize that to the first order, we’re just talking about almond milk, a trend which continue into the future.
      - dashundchen 8y ago
        And? I'm not sure what your point is. I was pointing out there are non-dairy milks with protein in them. Almond milk still uses less water and way less CO2e emissions than dairy to produce the same volume of milk. Animal agriculture is horrendous for the planet, any increase in non-dairy milk at the expense of dairy milk is a definite win for the environment. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46459714 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46459714 From the BBC calculator, which comes from University of Oxford researcher Joseph Poore, and Thomas Nemecek of the Agroecology and Environment Research Division in Zurich, Switzerland 1 glass (200ml) per serving almond milk daily Over an entire year your consumption of almond milk is contributing 51kg to your annual greenhouse gas emissions. ... 27,042 litres of water 1 glass (200ml) per serving dairy milk daily Over an entire year your consumption of dairy milk is contributing 229kg to your annual greenhouse gas emissions ... 45,733 litres of water 652m² land
- megablast 8y ago
  Isn’t every liquid mostly water? Even coke is 99% water?
ScottBurson 8y ago
If you're concerned about agricultural use of water in California, I would suggest a bigger concern is alfalfa, a low-value, water-intensive crop, most of which gets shipped to China. We are almost literally selling water to China. Almonds, at least, are a high-value crop, meaning that if we found a way to circumvent or invalidate the 19th-century water rights and raise the price of water to farmers, almond growers could pay the higher rates but crops like alfalfa would probably be rendered uneconomic.
- Pharmakon 8y ago
  High value, low value, the Western U.S. can’t support either. The profitability of the situation isn’t really a factor, it’s the consumption. I’d also argue that people have far more control over what they buy for ‘milk’ than they do over exports to China. Having said that, it’s very much a problem solving itself, with eventual depopulation.
- greglindahl 8y ago
  Do you have a source for California alfalfa mostly being sent to China? Most places on the Internet say that it's mostly used to feed California dairy cows. And that alfalfa cultivation is changing to higher value crops over time, as farmers take advantage of the value of their water rights.
lozenge 8y ago
In my experience they are not that high in sugar. Oatly doesn't add sugar and has about 2g/100ml or 3g/100ml. I looked up a cheap brand with more sugar than almond(2%) and they also had a very similar sugar level of under 3g/100ml. Every one has an unsweetened version on the same shelf as well. This is less than that of milk(without getting into the different kinds of sugar). In comparison, soda is 11g/100ml, juice is 9g/100ml, iced tea is 8g/100ml. Perhaps it is different in the US. I am amazed though, when I see people buying "skinny oat(or whatever) milk". Pretty sure you can achieve the same at home by mixing regular oat milk and some filtered/softened water.
- greglindahl 8y ago
  Oatly Skinny and Oatly Whole differ in the amount of fat, but have the same carbs, fiber, and protein content. So, it appears to be quite similar to skim milk, which is milk with reduced fat (cream skimmed off), not watered down milk. What amazes me is the strong opinions people have about this topic.
Cerium 8y ago
Well, it can't be called juice since almond milk contains no juice. It could be called an almond drink or beverage. The fact is, that both animal milk and almond milk are fat water emulsions with various additives to serve their purpose.
- Pharmakon 8y ago
  It’s definitely juice. n. A fluid naturally contained in plant or animal tissue: fruit juice; meat braised in its own juices. n. A bodily secretion: digestive juices. n. The liquid contained in something that is chiefly solid. They’re macerated and crushed, their contents mixed with water. Of course by the same token milk is also a subset of juice, of the type “mucosal excretion.”
PerfectElement 8y ago
> low in protein and fat is a bad sign. By that standard, human breast milk should be considered unhealthy (0.8%-0.9% protein, 3%-5% fat).
- gorilla_fight 8y ago
  3-5% fat is actually considered high-fat, for comparison, cow's whole milk is typically 3.25%, low-fat is 1% and skim/non-fat is 0-0.5%. Interestingly, the fat content of milk can vary drastically between species, from Holstein cows 3.6% (popular for high volume milk production, but less fatty), Brown Swiss cows 4.0%, Jersey cows 5.2% (prized for their rich creamy milks), Zebu cows 4.7%, goat 4.0%, up to buffalo 6.9%, yak 6.5%, sheep 7.5%, reindeer 17%, and even fin whale a whopping 42% fat and a similarly staggering 12% protein. (Source: _On Food and Cooking_ by Harold McGee, page 13).
  - Pharmakon 8y ago
    I’m loving your posts, and here’s a fun fact to add, fat content can vary between pregnancies, and there seems to be a difference based on the sex of the fetus, time of day or night, and a bunch of other factors. https://www.imedpub.com/articles/biochemical-differences-in-human-breastmilk-contents-according-to-infants-gender.pdf https://www.imedpub.com/articles/biochemical-differences-in-... Human milk composition is dynamic, and varies between mothers in the same and different populations. Breast milk content was also found to vary diurnally, over a feeding and in some species according to the gender of the breast feeding infant. This study aimed to determine if there are any quantitative differences in the biochemical constituents of breast milk according to the gender of the breast feeding infant. Forty eight breast feeding mothers participated in the study, 24 were breast feeding male infants and 24 were breast feeding female infants. Five ml of breast milk was collected from each mother then analyzed for lipid contents, carbohydrates, proteins and calcium. Carbohydrates, amino acids and calcium concentration were measured using colorimetric test of absorbance. There were significant differences in the concentration of lipids and calcium in breast milk of male and female breast feeding mothers (P-value<0.001 and 0.02, respectively). Our study indicates that breast milk is more dynamic than previously thought and concentration of breast milk contents should not be taken as fixed. This can lead to developing personalized formula feeding specific to the baby’s gender and age and matches his/her growth needs. Biology is damned complex.
dabbledash 8y ago
I don’t have any issue with these things as beverages, but cringe when I read mothers of babies old enough to switch off of human milk (or formula) ask “what kind of milk” they should be giving their child. As if almond milk is a “kind of milk” in any meaningful sense.
gorilla_fight 8y ago
I prefer this alternative naming by The Onion: https://www.theonion.com/fda-defends-decision-to-reclassify-alternative-milks-as-1827722953 https://www.theonion.com/fda-defends-decision-to-reclassify-... Astute as ever, America's finest news source turns this marketing-driven terminology on its head. This has happened before, industries creating imitation products deceptively similar to the real thing. For example in the early 1900s, states fought back against fake butter, but were ultimately overruled by the Supreme Court: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/people-and-culture/food/the-plate/2014/08/13/the-butter-wars-when-margarine-was-pink/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/people-and-culture/food/t... > Margarine manufacturers, to better appeal to the public, wanted to tint their product yellow; butter producers objected, claiming that yellow margarine, fraudulently masquerading as butter, was a deliberate ploy to deceive the public. (Butter from corn-fed cows is also anemically pale, and is routinely dyed to turn it an attractive butter-yellow; this practice, however, butter makers argued, was simply a cosmetic tweak.) > By 1902, 32 states had imposed color constraints on margarine. Vermont, New Hampshire, and South Dakota all passed laws demanding that margarine be dyed an off-putting pink; other states proposed it be colored red, brown, or black. The “pink laws” were overturned by the Supreme Court (on the grounds that it’s illegal to enforce the adulteration of food) but the ban on yellow margarine remained. (The last hold-out, Wisconsin, only repealed its margarine-color law in 1967.)
- Pharmakon 8y ago
  That was a really good read, and of course it would be Wisconsin who fought to the end for dairy. Personally I’m not interested in regulating “milk” and the term has been around for a while. I just think it’s worth pointing out the differences, but dying it a strange color is... too far.

InclinedPlane 8y ago

"Soy milk" as a term in the english language dates back to the late 1890s. It's a term that has been in common use for a very long period.

7952 8y ago

It means that it can be used in contexts where milk would usually be used. Like in a pancake or over cereal.