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Comment by kennydude | Hacker News Reader

Lacto free milk only works for when you are making stuff from scratch and not buying pre-made stuff. For whenever I use milk, I buy almond these days as it's marginally cheaper and I think it tastes nicer on a personal preference.

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It works after ingestion, no matter if pre- or while-made stuff. Lactose free milk is made by throwing in lactase. But not all lactase is used up in this process and still plenty is left in the milk.

Almond milk or the other "artificial" milk-a-likes are most of the times pure chemistry. You have to read the contents. Phosphates are added a lot (actually a big problem for people with kidney diseases, but also might be problematic for healthy ones as phosphates are added literally everywhere and the daily consumption amount might become to much) and stabilizers and all the other stuff needed for the artificial milk to look and to mouth-feel like the ordinary milk

It's more accurate to call them "emulsions." Some cheaper oat milks will actually fall slightly out of solution in the water and as a result you can see the fine grains. Soy milk, for example, can be used to make a kind of cheese analog called Tofu. A lot of oat milks have some gums or other thickeners mixed in not necessarily just because of mouthfeel but also because it makes the milk steamable for use with espresso. They're natural extracts from trees or other plants.

You can't really call them unnatural because the techniques used are available to home cooks using off-the-shelf ingredients. I can buy thickeners and render oats into a fine enough powder to make oat milk, for example.

I'm personally more concerned about water usage per gallon of "milk-like product." Almond milk is pretty bad where that's concerned because almond trees consume an enormous amount of water that's often pumped out of aquifers at faster than the recovery rate.

I call them unnatural because they're added where they're needed to achieve certain properties which aren't achievable without adding the needed unnatural stuff. Not because they're artificially designed like the sweeteners. Or artificially made like the glutamate which is identical to natural glutamate everywhere.

You can't call stabilizers on phosphate basis natural extracts from trees. They aren't. These are chemicaly designed and made in a chemical process. Even if they are chemicaly exact, which is not the case, the amounts needed of that stuff exceed the available Carob gum trees by far. But the trees have phosphate. It's among carbon the second column of life. :)

Just a sample what has been corrected by law:

https://kstawinska.medium.com/7-harmful-chemicals-in-vegan-m...

The article doesn't mention di/triphosphates, it doesn't mention potassium and a lot of others. It's all a question of the amount consumed and that depends on the products and the consumers body/health.

Industrially made vegan products are more chemistry than homemade, about the same within pre processed food, and even more chemistry as if one would eat steak & cheese & potato in various shapes 3x a day.

And then, which of the vegan guys does make the meat imitation chicken teriyaki at home or never eat in restaurants outside?

But the Link is a good read. And it's not over, just study contents of all the products next time in the supermarket. I can't buy half of the products :)

Is the water usage of milk substitutes worse than raising cows for milk? It's no use comparing almonds to some other crop.

No it's not. A cow lives much longer and eat while alive plants that needed water by themselves before. A cow must drink and it lose water naturally. Almond doesn't eat other plants, but lose water naturally too. Could be the possibel argumentation. So, I would say, one does not even have to Google this.. it's logical :) and then, you have a lot of cows but also a lot of almonds.

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