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Choosing a
Good Milk Substitute:
What to Look for and What to Avoid.
First of all, do not
feed any commercial milk substitute to an infant.
The best and only food for a young infant is human mother's breast
milk. If for some reason you cannot give your infant breast milk,
ask your doctor for a suitable formula.
As an adult, you don't need a milk
substitute to drink.
After weaning, the natural beverage for our species is water.
This
is
especially important if you are trying to lose weight.
For effective
weight loss, don't drink any beverages that contain calories.
But sometimes
you will want some kind of milk to put on your cereal. You also might
want it for making sauces or gravies. Here are the things to look for
in choosing the best milk substitute:
Things to look for
- Select a product that is made primarily of a
whole plant food. Some options are
soybeans, brown rice, oats, mixed grains, almonds, or hemp
seeds.
- Look for a milk that has a low percentage of
calories from fat.
- The mg of sodium in a serving should be no
greater than the calories per serving.
- Try to find a product that contains 3 or 4
grams of fiber per serving.
Things to avoid
- Added oil. Oil is just extra calories, and it
is also harmful
to our health. Even olive oil damages the lining of our blood vessels.
A good milk substitute will contain a little fat which
occurs naturally in the soybean or other main plant ingredient.
- Added sugar. Sugar is just more extra calories.
Get used to the taste of
an unsweetened milk. Vanilla flavored milks have a natural
sweet taste.
- Isolated soy protein, also called soy
protein isolate. This is
a highly-processed ingredient. Manufacturers use hexane and other
dangerous chemicals to isolate the protein from soybeans. Because the
soy protein is so concentrated, it raises blood levels of
insulin-like growth factor I (IGF-I). This increases our cancer risk.
- Carrageenan. It is linked with intestinal
inflammation and
irritable bowl disease (IBD.) It may cause ulcerations in the
gastro-intestinal tract and possibly even gastro-intestinal cancer.
- Artificial flavors, colors, or other chemicals.
- Vitamin A palmitate. According Joel Fuhrman MD,
supplemental
Vitamin A palmitate can lead to brittle bones. Get your vitamin A in
the form of plant carotenoids (carrots and sweet potatoes). Your body
will convert it naturally to the right amount of vitamin
A.
- Iron.
Iron is an oxidant that can cause cellular damage if we get too much of
it. Never take supplemental iron unless your doctor tests your blood
and says you are anemic.
- Other vitamins and minerals, except
for vitamin
B12. We are not big fans of supplements. Get your nutrients from whole
plant foods.
The best choices
Once you start
reading nutrition labels, you will discover that the perfect
commercial milk substitute doesn't seem to exist. None of them meet all
of our requirements. And they are all expensive.
What is the solution?
Our answer is this: we keep a little cooked brown rice in the fridge
and we make our own rice milk. Here
is our simple rice milk recipe, which you can easily make in the blender. 
We
also keep a few quarts of WestSoy Unsweetened soy milk on the shelf as
a
backup. See
the nutrition
information on this soy milk.
We only use
this on days when we forget to
cook brown rice and we just need something fast.
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