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There are so
many
kinds of soy milk.
Which ones are best for weight loss?
Let's look at the labels on a few kinds of soy milk. Once you
have an
idea of what to look for, you can evaluate the brands available in your
market.
For weight loss, it is best to use non-dairy milks
only to
moisten your breakfast cereal. Just drink water, tea, or other natural
no-calorie beverages. Here
is a
basic lesson on how to analyze nutrition labels.
Organic WestSoy Lite
This milk is made from organic soybeans. We can't tell anything from
the front
of the box except the fact that it is organic. All of the essential
information is on the back of the package.
- We see from the
Nutrition Facts label that this milk is 29% fat
(20/70.) That meets government guidelines but it's really not good
enough. We would like to see 10% fat.
- There are 95 mgs sodium in a 70-calorie
portion. That is a bit high.
The ideal would be 70 mg or less.
- There is less than 1 g of fiber in a serving.
Now we check the list of ingredients. There are a few things
here that we would like to avoid, like:
- dehydrated cane juice
(sugar)
- salt
- carrageenan
- vitamin A palmitate
Tricalcium phosphate is a mineral that they add to low fat milk
substitutes to make the milk look "white". It also increases the
calcium content to make it closer to that of cows' milk. It may not be
harmful, but it is not really necessary. We would prefer to get our
calcium from leafy greens and other whole foods. A little vitamin B12
would be nice though.....
Maybe we can find a product that better meets our needs. Here are more details about what
to look for and what to avoid in a milk substitute.
WestSoy Low Fat
We don't have any commercial tie to WestSoy. It just happens that all
of the soy milk photos we have right now are of their products. This
package looks quite similar to the previous one, so maybe one of them
has replaced the other.
That is not important. We just want to examine a few labels to see what
ingredients we find in these products.
- The Nutrition Facts for this product show us
that it is 17% fat
(90/15.) That is closer to our ideal of 10% fat.
- There are 90 mg of sodium in a 90-calorie
portion. Perfect.
- A serving contains 2 g of fiber. So far so good.
On the ingredient list we find:
- extracts of corn and malted barley
(sweeteners)
- tricalcium phosphate
- salt
- Vitamin A palmitate
This product is lower in fat and sodium, but it still contains some
ingredients we want to avoid. Let's give WestSoy one more chance.
WestSoy Organic Unsweetened
This product is unsweetened. Maybe it has some other good qualities
too.
- This soy milk is 44% fat. That is a very
high percentage. Wow.
- It contains only 30 mg sodium in a 90-calorie
portion. Terrific.
- A serving has 4 g fiber. Excellent for a liquid.
The ingredient list couldn't be any simpler than this. Soybeans are
naturally 44% fat. That is the reason the milk is high in fat.
Notice that one cup of this unsweetened soy milk has a similar calorie
count to
one cup of the other two products. The others get some
calories from
sweeteners, which contain no nutrition. This product gets all of its
calories from whole soybeans. We would feel OK using small amounts of
this on cereal or in sauces. We certainly would not drink it as a
beverage.
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