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.
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
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.
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.
> 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?
They carry energy in forms that can cause problems when they represent a too large fraction of the daily energy intake. Moreover, energy from vegetable products like maize, rice, wheat or high-oleic sunflower oil is many, many times cheaper, while also having much less health risks. So eating dairy for getting energy makes absolutely no sense.
Energy as carbohydrates should consist mostly of glucose (preferably as starch, for slower digestion). Half of lactose is galactose, which like fructose cannot be used directly, but it must be converted by the liver, which may be overwhelmed when too much is ingested.
There are studies that have concluded that galactose, when eaten in excess or when the liver is worse at converting it, can lead to eye cataract. While this is not certain, based on personal anecdotes I believe that this is true, because all of the people whom I know, and who had been eating a lot of dairy for a long time, eventually have developed eye cataracts in their old age.
Energy as fat should consist mostly of oleic acid (the main component of storage fat in humans). While the effect of high daily intakes of saturated fatty acids is still debated, the overwhelming evidence is that they are harmful.
From personal experience I believe this to be true. Until about 5 years ago, I had been eating large quantities of dairy products every day. Then I have been diagnosed with incipient atherosclerosis, which scared me. Examining my habits, I could not identify any other cause, except the high consumption of dairy. Based on this assumption, I have completely changed the composition of fat that I am eating daily. Now more than 90% of my daily intake of fats comes from a mixture of oils chosen such as to have adequate proportions of oleic acid, linoleic acid, DHA & EPA and liposoluble vitamins.
About one year after this change from dairy to healthy fats, all symptoms of atherosclerosis have disappeared and there were also other very noticeable improvements in my cardiovascular health.
So now I am pretty much convinced that the fat from dairy products is harmful, at least in excessive quantities. I do not believe that eating once a week something containing milk, cheese, whipped cream or butter can cause any problems, but eating such food every day, most likely will be bad.
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.
.. 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.
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.
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.
Tonyu (soy milk) isn’t neither a cause of obesity in Asia, and by the way is a traditional food over there. It already contains Calcium, Magnesium, Potassium and Iron. I hardly see how adding some B12, more calcium… leads to bad health effects.
I think we all know that the principal bad ingredients in processed beverage are sugar, sweeteners… but that’s neither a basic or traditional ingredient in tonyu.
Saying "soy milk is HPF" is like saying "cow milk is HPF" based on the studies of milk-based -junk-food-drinks.
It’s good to have a common scale and you have to take shortcuts to define it, however it’s important to understand those shortcuts and not following the blindly.
I also highly encourage anyone trying marinated tofu (read the ingredients), those are also considered HPF by Nova but most of them aren’t worse than smash potatoes with a vegetable broth.
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
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
The same Physician Michael Klaper who thinks that switching to a plant-based diet cures Crohn's disease?
Well, maybe he's right.
https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/11/6/1385
[dead]
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.
> 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).
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
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.
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.
> 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?
They carry energy in forms that can cause problems when they represent a too large fraction of the daily energy intake. Moreover, energy from vegetable products like maize, rice, wheat or high-oleic sunflower oil is many, many times cheaper, while also having much less health risks. So eating dairy for getting energy makes absolutely no sense.
Energy as carbohydrates should consist mostly of glucose (preferably as starch, for slower digestion). Half of lactose is galactose, which like fructose cannot be used directly, but it must be converted by the liver, which may be overwhelmed when too much is ingested.
There are studies that have concluded that galactose, when eaten in excess or when the liver is worse at converting it, can lead to eye cataract. While this is not certain, based on personal anecdotes I believe that this is true, because all of the people whom I know, and who had been eating a lot of dairy for a long time, eventually have developed eye cataracts in their old age.
Energy as fat should consist mostly of oleic acid (the main component of storage fat in humans). While the effect of high daily intakes of saturated fatty acids is still debated, the overwhelming evidence is that they are harmful.
From personal experience I believe this to be true. Until about 5 years ago, I had been eating large quantities of dairy products every day. Then I have been diagnosed with incipient atherosclerosis, which scared me. Examining my habits, I could not identify any other cause, except the high consumption of dairy. Based on this assumption, I have completely changed the composition of fat that I am eating daily. Now more than 90% of my daily intake of fats comes from a mixture of oils chosen such as to have adequate proportions of oleic acid, linoleic acid, DHA & EPA and liposoluble vitamins.
About one year after this change from dairy to healthy fats, all symptoms of atherosclerosis have disappeared and there were also other very noticeable improvements in my cardiovascular health.
So now I am pretty much convinced that the fat from dairy products is harmful, at least in excessive quantities. I do not believe that eating once a week something containing milk, cheese, whipped cream or butter can cause any problems, but eating such food every day, most likely will be bad.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
Tonyu (soy milk) isn’t neither a cause of obesity in Asia, and by the way is a traditional food over there. It already contains Calcium, Magnesium, Potassium and Iron. I hardly see how adding some B12, more calcium… leads to bad health effects.
I think we all know that the principal bad ingredients in processed beverage are sugar, sweeteners… but that’s neither a basic or traditional ingredient in tonyu.
Saying "soy milk is HPF" is like saying "cow milk is HPF" based on the studies of milk-based -junk-food-drinks.
It’s good to have a common scale and you have to take shortcuts to define it, however it’s important to understand those shortcuts and not following the blindly.
I also highly encourage anyone trying marinated tofu (read the ingredients), those are also considered HPF by Nova but most of them aren’t worse than smash potatoes with a vegetable broth.
Nobody actually needs to drink dairy. I thought that was already well established.
Nobody actually needs <specific food>.
Nobody actually needs to eat beans.
Should be rebranded "calcium fortified drinks"