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.
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.
theGeatZhopa|1 year ago
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
throwway120385|1 year ago
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.