Got milk? Well, what kind?
Cow’s milk consumption in America has drastically declined in recent years as people increasingly turn to soy, oat, almond or the long list of alternatives to splash in their morning coffee or mix in their vegan mac and cheese.
But as consumers shy away from cow’s milk for health, sustainability and other reasons, experts warn that plant-based options are not always nutritionally equal to what comes from the dairy farm.
A new, unpublished study presented Monday in Boston at Nutrition 2023, the annual meeting of the American Society for Nutrition, determined that some alt-milks do not contain the same levels of the nutritional ingredients found in dairy, CNN reports.
Researchers at the University of Minnesota created a database of nearly 20,000 food and nutrients labels, including 233 plant-based milk products from 23 manufacturers.
The study found that only 28 of the beverages had as much or more protein, vitamin D and calcium as cow’s milk.
About half were fortified with vitamin D, two-thirds were fortified with calcium, and nearly 20% had protein levels similar to dairy.
Lead study author and registered dietitian Abigail Johnson noted that people need not be “seriously concerned about this, as it’s easy to get these nutrients from other sources, and cow’s milk certainly isn’t perfect and infallible.”
“But if a consumer thinks plant-based milks are a one-to-one substitution for dairy, many of them are not,” she warned.
The study concluded that only 38 of the 223 milk alternatives had 8 grams of protein or more — the amount typically found in an 8-ounce glass of milk.
Plant-based milks typically contain only about 2 grams of protein while soy- and pea-based milks and some milk blends were found to have between 6 and 10 grams per 8-ounce serving.
When looking at calcium and vitamin D, the study concluded that 170 of the 233 alt-milk options were fortified with nearly the same amount as a glass of dairy milk.
The researchers found that 76% of the oat-based products, 69% of the soy-based alternatives, and 66% of the almond-based options were fortified with calcium and vitamin D.
The study also looked at saturated fat, sugar and fiber.
The majority of the plant milk products were found to have similar levels of saturated fat as 1% and skim milk, but were not recommended as sufficient sources of fiber.
And about a third of plant-based milks have levels of sugar similar to strawberry or chocolate milk.
“The key takeaway is if you’re consuming these because of a specific nutrient, you need to be reading the label because the products are so different from each other,” Johnson said.