The Science Behind Lactose Intolerance: A Guide to Choosing the Right Milk

If you're lactose intolerant, choosing the right milk can be a daunting task. There are several options available, each with its own pros and cons. Let's dive into the world of milks and explore the different choices you have.

For those who are lactose intolerant, the issue is not with the taste or texture of dairy milk, but rather with the sugar it contains called lactose. This means that when we eat dairy, our small intestine can't absorb it which means it keeps going from your small intestine into your large intestine and when it gets there it's fermented by bacteria which causes gas which can cause bloating and diarrhea and that feeling of being unwell. So in that case you've got a couple of choices if you're lactose intolerant.

You can choose one of the plant-based milks, such as almond milk, soy milk, or oat milk. These alternatives are made from plants rather than animals and do not contain lactose. However, it's worth noting that some plant-based milks may be fortified with calcium, vitamins, or other nutrients that are typically found in dairy milk.

Alternatively, you can take a lactase tablet which is a tablet that has the enzymes that break down that sugar whenever you eat dairy or lactose-free milk which is just normal milk that has had the tablet added with the enzymes in so they've already broken down the lactose for you. This means it's already split into two simple sugars, making it easier to digest.

Next up is the environmental impact of these milks. Which one is best or worst for the environment? Interestingly, this is such a complicated equation to work out because there are so many factors that go into making a product, right the way through from planting trees or buying your cows and feeding them up to the number of years that they don't produce milk for and all the different factors like how much you feed them what type of food you feed them and how much water do they need.

There are also factors related to processing plants, such as the amount of water used just in washing equipment and containers, and the electricity used for refrigeration or refrigerated trucks. Additionally, there are emissions from tractors working on the farm. There are so many factors that go into this equation that I'm 100% convinced you could manipulate that data to make either one of them look better. In fact, in some articles that were trying to promote almond milk or one of the plant milks said that dairy milk uses five times the amount of water and five times the amount of emissions.

However, when I actually read research studies that went to 180 different dairy farms ranging from five cows up to 520 and looked at it, it was nowhere near that amount. In fact, some of them were lower than the plant milk said they used to make. So honestly, I think that it's a really complicated equation and as I said you can actually find dairies that are very efficient and have a low environmental impact and you can probably vice versa find processing plants for these that are not very efficient and have a bigger environmental impact.

So there's not really one that I can pull out for you and quite confidently say is better for the environment. But what I can tell you is something that makes a huge difference is the packaging that you buy your milk in. If you buy it in tetra packs, it has a lot less of an environmental impact than if you buy it in p-e-t bottles that haven't been made from recycled pet. If it's been made from recycled pet, it still has a lesser impact but not as low as your tetra packs.

So if possible, if you can make a choice about the packaging that it comes in, then that could be making a good environmental impact. With thanks to my patrons for making this video possible.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enWelcome to How To Cook That I'm Ann Reardon and in this episode we are taking a look at  milk. A bottle of milk thanks. Low fat, no fat, full cream, high calcium, high protein,  soy light skim, omega-3, high calcium with vitamin D and folate or extra dollop? What  type of milk should you be drinking that is best for your health, best for the environment?  There are so many videos out there already that say stop drinking dairy, including this one  from Food Theory which is very very similar in the look of the thumbnail and the content of the video  to this one that was from brew two years earlier. So today we're just going to take an unbiased look  at milk and milk alternatives. I am not affiliated with any of these products any of the companies  not affiliated with the dairy industry 🐮 or the plant-based milk industry, I am just going to give  you an unbiased look at both of them so you can make up your own mind. The first argument against  milk is out of concern for the cows themselves ... a little while ago there were some videos that  came out with undercover footage from some of the dairy farms showing cows being really mistreated,  I'm not going to show you the footage because it was quite disturbing and then sick and injured  cows not getting veterinary care not being looked after and as I said it's quite disturbing and i  think everyone would agree that's not okay, certainly would be illegal to treat animals  like that here in Australia. The other thing that people are concerned about which is not so much  the cruelty of the treatment but the way they're treated, so in order to produce lots of milk the  cows are impregnated every year the calves are then taken away and fed separately rather than  being able to feed off the mother cow and people don't want that, they they want the idea of the  cow just being able to go out in the paddock and the calf being out of drink from the cow and then  we still get the milk but in reality if you did that you would need three times the number of  cows in a herd to get the same amount of milk as you get if you do it the way they currently do it.  So that would obviously increase the cost of milk a lot which is not practical in a lot of places.  If you are someone who has plenty of money there are dairies around that do ethical farming or  farming where the cows are left with their calves and so if you do a bit of googling you'll be able  to find a dairy that does that or you could go to milk alternatives. I found this video very  interesting it said that if we all just asked for milk alternatives in our coffee instead of  dairy milk that it would stamp out the practices that we just talked about at farms ... but if you  just add one extra word you say i'll have a soy latte i'll have an oat latte i'll have an almond  latte or one of the endless milks that now exist all of that disappears your name is no longer  attached to that immorality it's gone you're no longer responsible it's as simple as that  right ... In reality since 1975 the consumption of milk in the U.S of liquid milk has decreased 40  since 1975 and the consumption of milk alternatives has gone up. But as a whole the  dairy consumption has gone up so that's mainly due to an increase in the amount of butter and cheese  and yogurt that's being consumed. So if you decrease this but then you eat your dairy instead  that makes no difference to the cows they still have to be milked to make those products so if you  are seriously concerned about the cows you'd have to stop all dairy in your diet not just switch  the milks and then the cows don't get too frolic in a paddock with their calves and live happily  ever after, there would be no dairy cows then they wouldn't be needed anymore so they just wouldn't  exist. So if that appeals to you go for that if you like the idea of them frolicking in the  fields go for a boutique dairy and google search and find one of those near you that you can go and  buy and pay the premium prices. So that's the cows welfare on to nutrition why do we even drink milk?  Well milk is currently one of the most widely produced foods in the world it's used  worldwide and the reason why is because cows have a different digestive system to us.  They can eat foods that we can't eat so things like hay and grass so something that's inedible  to us they can eat that and turn it into something edible ... milk and that's especially important in  countries where they struggle to get enough food. Having milk as a food source can help  decrease child mortality and increase longevity, so it's an important food source all around the  world. Interestingly if you are growing plants for every 100 kilos of plant food grown there is 37  kilos of by-products or waste I guess you'd call it. That currently gets fed to cows because they  can eat that same as the skins that are taken off the soybeans that gets sent for livestock food so  a lot of the byproducts or waste from growing plants can then go over for animal food and you  can't just say let's send all of that to humans to eat because a lot of that's inedible we don't have  the same digestive system we can't just eat what cows can eat it doesn't work that way. The other  thing a lot of people say is well maybe we should just swap the land that all the dairy cows are on  and plant crops on it and we should all just eat the plants but the trouble with that is two-thirds  of the land that the cows are on is not suitable for plant crops, it either doesn't have enough  rain and water where it is or it's too rocky or too hilly it's not suitable for plant crops so a  lot of countries are just clearing more forest to make room for more plant crops which is obviously  not a good end result of what we want to do. So what if you're not actually that interested in the  big picture and the whole world and does everyone have enough food to eat you just want to know for  you for yourself should you be drinking dairy or should you be drinking dairy alternatives which  one is better? Well let's talk about that now the reason that milk and dairy have their own  food group is because there's something that they are a very good source of ... that's the same with  all the food groups the reason it's separated is not just for fun but each one of those provides  a group of nutrients that it's very good at providing and the others are not so good at.  Dairy obviously most of you would know provides calcium which is important for your teeth and your  bones they're mainly made up of calcium and you need that especially when your bones are growing  and they're getting stronger and thicker we'll talk more about that later.  So where can you get calcium from obviously you can get it from cow's milk,  one glass of cow's milk this size 250 mls has in it 300 milligrams of calcium. Now if we look at  this video from Food Theory they're telling us some other places that we can get that calcium  from. If the primary reason you're drinking milk is to get calcium and vitamin D so you can grow  bigger and stronger consider ways to get the same or better nutrition with less controversy and less  money. Green vegetables like broccoli and kale more calcium than milk if you hate green things  just try eating some beans you know those fun little round guys that come in burritos and chilli  more calcium than milk yup i was surprised too. They say in their video that broccoli and  kale have more calcium than milk and they show a picture of cabbage not kale so i guess we'll  do kale and cabbage because i'm not sure which one they meant and then they also had red kidney  beans and said that they contain more calcium than milk as well. So let's do a comparison  to get that 300 milligrams of calcium that you get in one glass of milk you would need to eat  212 grams of kale and you might think that's easy, I eat that much in a day but i can guarantee if  you put that in front of a child that is a lot of kale to get them to eat especially if they need  more than one serve of dairy in a day that's quite a lot. Now technically gram for gram this has  slightly more calcium but to say that it has more calcium than milk is a bit deceptive because a  serve of kale is not this much kale like that is a lot i've never been served that much kale even  if i've had a kale salad so if you're looking at serve to serve milk has a lot more calcium in it  than kale. Next they had broccoli you would need to eat 960 grams or nearly a kilo of broccoli to  get the same amount of calcium as you would in this glass of milk. I don't even know how they  thought that broccoli had more calcium than milk because it doesn't even gram for gram i'm not sure  where they got that from then there's cabbage you would need to eat 860 grams of cabbage  that's a lot of cabbage and what about red kidney beans you would need to eat 860 grams  of red kidney beans to get the same amount of calcium as is in the glass of milk and one thing  they forgot to mention or they didn't know I'm not sure which is that cabbage contains oxylates  and red kidney beans contain phytates both of those things decrease the amount of calcium that  you can absorb from that food into your body 🧐 so they bind to the calcium and so that it's not  available for you to absorb so in order to get the same amount of calcium actually absorbed and  into your body as you would from this milk you would need to actually have this much cabbage...not finished yetthere we go, that's enough cabbage to get the same amount as in one glass of milk. So let's assume  that they didn't mean cabbage they just meant kale and their editor got the picture wrong we'll get  rid of the cabbage and let's just look at the red kidney beans, so to get the same amount of calcium  absorbed into your body as would be absorbed from drinking this glass of milk you're going to need  to eat 💪 this many red kidney beans as a heavy plate and these ones as well i use them in the  equation so that's your serve of red kidney beans to get your calcium. So good luck getting your  little kid to eat that many red kidney beans to get just one serve of calcium in their day! Now it  is really important that kids get enough so that's why i'm showing you this visually so you can go oh  i can't just have some of this, yes broccoli has some calcium in, but it's not a great high  source of calcium like milk is so you have to have a lot of it to get enough calcium. What about your  milk alternatives? Let's look at how they're made they're all made in a very similar way so  let's look at almonds for example if you take your almonds and you add some water and then you  leave that to soak overnight then you drain it add more water put it in a blender and blitz it up...and then strain that through a fine cloth and squeeze all the liquid out and this bit of the  almond is usually just wasted and at this point it doesn't taste quite like milk so most people  will add some sweetener or some sugar to make it taste more like cow's milk and in a commercial  factory they're usually also homogenized which means making the fat globules in it so small  that it stays spread throughout the milk instead of settling to the top and pasteurized which just  means it's heated up to a temperature that will kill the bacteria so it has a longer shelf life  the exact same way that normal dairy milk is homogenized and pasteurized as well and then  some of your specialty milks like your barista milks have additional things added like gum and  emulsifiers. If you don't add them it won't foam and won't froth when you put it under the steam  so you need to add those to make it behave like milk does if you want to use it for those uses.  Naturally these are not high in calcium so legally they have to be fortified which means calcium is  added to them during the processing. So if you have a look at the nutritional information panel  you'll see each of these has at least 300 milligrams of calcium per glass so you can  choose to drink dairy milks or milk alternatives and there is enough calcium in them for you,  I don't care which one you have as far as calcium is concerned doesn't matter you can get it added  in in these ones because they're fortified or you can get it naturally from these that's up to you,  your choice but if you're making your own nut milks particularly if you have kids at home you  need to figure out where they're going to get that calcium from and that's really important  because over our lifetime our bone density and our bone mass increases obviously as we're a  child our bones are growing longer but even in your adult years, so right up until your mid-20s,  your bone mass or your density of your bones is increasing and we want to get it as high as we can  and the reason being is after that it starts declining and particularly for women once you hit  menopause that decline is much faster and there's been a lot of studies recently looking at if we  increase the calcium to a very high amount does it make that decline less so in older years? So  we're not no one is debating do kids need calcium for their bones to grow in fact studies have shown  that if you don't have enough calcium you won't grow as tall as if you have enough calcium and  these studies up here don't hear me wrong they're not saying that older people don't need calcium at  all they're comparing people who are having say a glass and a half of milk a day to what if you  had four serves worth of calcium a day or we give you a big calcium supplement does that make any  difference to that regression of your bone mass? And they've found it does make a difference but  it's not as huge as if they treat you with other medications. Okay the next nutritional concern  is saturated fat ... now saturated fat is a type of fat that usually comes from animals  but some plant sources are saturated like coconut fat is saturated fat and saturated fat is of  concern because it's been shown time and time and time again in studies that it's not good for  your cardiovascular health or your heart health. Increases cholesterol increases the risk of heart  attacks and all of that sort of thing. This one 100 agree with so if you're going to choose dairy  choose low fat dairy. If you chose a skim milk for example you would have less saturated fat  in that than if you had one of these plant-based milks but if you have full fat milk you're going  to be getting a lot more saturated fat. Next is allergies and intolerances now if you are allergic  to the protein in cow's milk you will know about it you won't need me to tell you about it  if you have cow's milk then you will get hives and blisters and swelling at the face and vomiting and  sometimes in severe cases swelling of the tongue and the throat which is an anaphylactic reaction  where you can't breathe and you need to go to hospital or it can be life-threatening.  In that case you don't touch dairy at all and you already know that you should have an epipen  and you shouldn't be going near it. In that case one of the plant-based alternatives is for you in  the same way as if you're allergic to tree nuts you can't go near the almond milks because the  same thing will happen to you. Now much more common than an allergy an actual true allergy  is an intolerance where someone can have some of it but they can't have much of it or they'll have  a reaction. The most common one that people would associate with milk is called lactose intolerance.  Now lactose is the sugar in milk and it's a disaccharide meaning it's made up of two sugars  joined together and in that form we can't digest it we have to break it into the two separate ones  so that we can absorb it. So what happens in order to break it in the two is we need an enzyme called  lactase ... the milk sugars lactose enzymes called lactase you break it in two you absorb  it not a problem. Now most people have that enzyme they make it in their bodies  when they're babies because they need to be able to absorb the breast milk that they're being fed  and it's usually not an issue and then as they get older the amount of that enzyme can decrease.  There's only about a third of people in the world who that enzyme doesn't decrease they still have  it all the way into adulthood and can have milk no problem at all without causing any issues.  If you don't have the enzyme that sugar can't be broken down which means you can't absorb it which  means it keeps going from your small intestine into your large intestine and when it gets there  it's fermented by bacteria which causes gas which can cause bloating and diarrhea and that feeling  of being unwell 🤢 So in that case you've got a couple of choices if you're lactose intolerant  you can choose one of the plant-based milks. You can choose to take a lactase tablet which is a  tablet that has the enzymes that break down that sugar whenever you eat dairy or you can choose a  lactose free milk which is just normal milk that has had the tablet added with the enzymes in so  they've already broken down the lactose for you so it's already split into the two so if  you've never tasted it it actually tastes slightly sweeter than normal milk even though it's got the  same amount of sugar in it and that's because it's already been split up and broken down.  Next is the environmental impact, which one of these milks is best or worst for the environment  interestingly this is such a complicated equation to work out because there are so, so many factors  that go into making a product, right the way through from the beginning from planting trees  or buying your cows and feeding them up the number of years that they don't produce milk  for and all the different factors like how much you feed them what type of food you feed them  and how much water do they need and the processing plant, how much water is used just in washing  equipment and washing containers and how much electricity is used how much electricity is used  for refrigeration or refrigerated trucks and how many fumes are put out from the tractors that are  working on the farm there are so many factors that go into this equation that i'm 💯% convinced you  could manipulate that data to make either one of them look better in fact in some articles that i  read that were trying to promote almond milk or one of the plant milks said that  dairy milk uses five times the amount of water to make and five times the amount of emissions  but then when i actually read research studies that went to 180 different dairy farms ranging  from five cows up to 520 and looked at it it was nowhere near that amount, in fact some  of them were lower than the plant milk said that they used to make. So honestly I think that it's  a really, really complicated equation and as i said you can actually find dairies that are  very efficient and have a low environmental impact and you can probably vice versa find  processing plants for these that are not very efficient and have a bigger environmental impact.  So there's not really one that i can pull out for you and quite confidently say is  better for the environment but what i can tell you is something that makes a huge difference  is the packaging that you buy your milk in ... if you buy it in these tetra packs  it has a lot less of an environmental impact than if you buy it in the p-e-t bottles that haven't  been made from recycled pet if it's been made from recycled pet it has a lesser impact but not as low  as your tetra packs so if possible if you can make a choice about the packaging that it comes in  then that could be making a good environmental impact. So there you go i hope that helps it's  an unbiased look at all the different milks and you can make your own decision about which  one you choose. With thanks to my patrons for making this video possible here is a list of  legends and if you like this video make sure you let the algorithm know that you did by liking,  commenting sharing and watching more videos make it a great week and i'll see you on Friday 😃\n"