Though I agree with disliking the sweetened stuff. I'm not sure who the market for the sweetened stuff is for - coffee creamer maybe, or trying to simulate milk lactose? but the unsweetened works just as well in any scenario.
Additionally, nut and oat milks are very easy and cheap to make with just a blender and cheesecloth. You can control the amount of food you want to "milk" and change the thickness/mouthfeel, add a little vanilla and end up with a much better result than the 'watered-down' store brands.
That's a completely different argument from your original one. And you could apply it to any food, a lot of people find cow milk "fucking disgusting", there's no point arguing on subjective taste
I don't know why you'd write that. The almond milk I buy is unsweetened, and I'm pretty sure it's a popular one since they sell it by the pallet at Costco. All the common soy milks offer an unsweetened option AFAIK.
It may be unsweetened, but it has a lot of added ingredients you might not want. Here are the nutritional facts: https://www.costco.com/wcsstore/CostcoUSBCCatalogAssetStore/...
* Organic Almond Base (Filtered Water, Organic Almonds)
* Organic Vanilla Flavor
* Sea Salt
* Sunflower Lecithin: this is an emulsifier
* Organic Locust Bean Gum: a thickening and gelling agent
* Gellan Gum: another gelling agent
* Vitamin A Palmitate: an ester of retinol, less bioavailable than the retinol vitamin A found in animal foods
* Ergocalciferol (Vitamin D2): a different type of vitamin D than D3 (cholecalciferol) which is found in organ meats, eggs, diary,
* DL-Alpha-Tocopheryl Acetate (Vitamin E): a synthetic ester of alpha-tocopheryl, with less than half the bioavailability as alpha-tocopheryl vitamin E, but longer shelf life
* Riboflavin (Vitamin B2)
* Zinc Gluconate
* Cyanocobalamin (Vitamin B12)
I came to the same conclusion, to expand on this point: lactose = glucose + galactose, and there is some interesting research on the benefits of galactose:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3240634/ Galactose Enhances Oxidative Metabolism and Reveals Mitochondrial Dysfunction in Human Primary Muscle Cells
normally it is broken down to glucose, which can be quickly used for energy by the muscular system. In contrast, sucrose = glucose + fructose, the fructose requiring a complex breakdown process by the liver (see Robert Lustig's research, especially his 2009 lecture _Sugar: The Bitter Truth_).
Milk can actually be quite healthful, an excellent source of fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E, and K2, depending on the conditions the cow was raised in and the forage and pasture she was fed. It is also absent of many of the compounds found in nut-based products, including phytoestrogens: plant-based estrogen found in soybeans, phytic acid: inhibits absorption of dietary minerals calcium/iron/zinc found in oats (although the phytate content can be reduced by soaking the oats overnight, how many producers of oat-based products do this?) and almonds/hazelnuts/peanuts/tiger nuts/walnuts/cashews, lectins: carbohydrate-binding proteins found in legumes including peas and soybeans.
From a purely nutritional standpoint, these alternative "mylks" (hat tip to the EU for preventing a corruption of the meaning of the word "milk") seem to be strictly inferior: lower in the good stuff, higher in the bad stuff.
> Otherwise, I might as well drink soda,--from looking at the sugar content of most of these "milks" it's roughly as healthy.
This reminds me of the push to replace soda with fruit juice, but then it turned out they both often have a comparable sugar content: https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/06/09/319230765/fr...
History repeats, and yet again we see a similar push. Personally I am sticking with good old-fashioned milk myself, the bar to replace a 10,000 year old (estimated 9000-7000 BCE) food is quite high.
I first found out about soaked oats from _Wild Fermentation: The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live-Culture Foods_ by Sandor Ellix Katz, but interestingly it is an older practice, we now know improves digestability (excerpt from page 118):
> Oatmeal (or "oytmeal", as my father always calls it, in imitation of his immigrant grandmother) is the quintessential comfort food. It is soft and mushy, harkening back to that long ago time of infancy, when all our food was of such a consistency and lovingly spoon-fed to us. In early modern Europe, according to an article by Elizabeth Meyer-Renschhausen in the anthropology journal _Food and Foodways_, porridges were generally fermented and eaten as a "sour soup"[10]. Fermenting oats before cooking them not only makes them more nutritious and digestible, it makes the resulting oatmeal much creamer as well. For the freshest, most nutritious oatmlea, coarsely grind whole oats yourself when you are ready to use them, though steel-cut oats or rolled oats will work fine, too.
[10] _Food and Foodways_: "New Chapter Health Report", Elizabeth Meyer-Renschhausen, 2000