Do you often feel overwhelmed with how to choose the right plant based milk?
It‘s pretty clear due to environmental concerns, animal cruelty & food intolerances why more and more people are making the move to plant based milks. Personally I find it the easiest swap for my clients to improve their nutrition. Definitely, when we compare it to cheese anyway!
We use the word ‘mylk’ when we refer to plant based options to differentiate it from animal milk.
It’s easy to see how the food industry has promoted the many options to consumers to jump on this trend but are you doing yourself more harm than good?
Well with this as your guide, I’m confident you will have clarity on how to choose between the many brands. I also want to share, as a trained barista, the best choices to make creamy foaming coffee are not necessarily the best for your health!
The first thing I look for is how many ingredients are listed. High quality, unprocessed foods that are key to a healthy whole food diet will typically have less than 5 ingredients if it’s a packaged item. So as close to that as possible, is ideal.
Next, I look for what are the ingredients listed. I am looking to recognise these ingredients as whole real foods from nature. So I would expect to see almonds, oats, soybeans, coconut, water, salt. What you want to completely avoid are highly processed oils such as sunflower & vegetable oils that are used to improve consistency. In addition, preservatives & additives such as vegetable gums and carrageenan which studies have found to cause inflammation & digestive issues.
Finally, we know how much the food industry loves to add the highly addictive substance sugar to all our foods to influence our purchase decisions by taste. So you can look for natural sweeteners such as tapioca, rice, date & monk fruit and avoid any refined sugars which include forms of cane sugar and syrups
Plant based mylk is really easy to make, you can check out my cashew or almond mylk recipes in my blogs and there are so many options now available from almond, oat, soy, coconut & the all so creamy macadamia nut mylk that you can really choose the best one for your palate, genetics & use.
Check out my Youtube page for my short video also on this topic!
