Is Your Nondairy Milk Making You Fart?

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Dairy, if you can tolerate it, can be pretty awesome. Jarlsberg cheese, for example, contains the vital vitamin K2, which is more essential for bone formation than calcium, since it signals the osteoblasts (aka, your little bone cells) to start doing their job to increase skeletal strength and density.

However, dairy doesn’t always treat us well.

Lactose intolerance purportedly affects 65% of the human population, much more than it did in days past.

Thus, nut milks! Oat milks! Coconut milks! Nondairy milk options are flooding the market, with no sign of stopping anytime soon.

But which ones are actually good for you? Anything that contains added ingredients, even if they’re added vitamins and minerals, has the risk of causing bloating and gas due to the preservatives.

Luckily, I got you on this.

Here’s how to take the trauma out of future grocery decisions:

Step 1) Bookmark the Food Additives List and keep it on your phone, or browser if you are homebound and do your shopping online.

Step 2) Next time you go grocery shopping, take a look at the ingredients of your nondairy options. When you come to a word you don’t know, hit the search function on the Food Additives List.

Step 3) Read the description of the additive and decide if it’s worth the GI trouble.

Step 4) Rinse and repeat.

Step 5) Get so good at this that you know off the top of your head which brands are conducive to your health and goals. For example, when someone asks me about a vegan milk and they don’t have any nutritional deficiencies — taking a regular multivitamin, etc — then I recommend something like Elmhurst because the ingredients are literally just nuts and water. This isn’t to say you ONLY can drink Elmhust, but look for a comparable ingredient list. Or make your own!

At the end of the day, it’s just about biochemical function. The less you put into a food, the easier it is to digest — and wasn’t ease of digestion the reason we started this whole nondairy revolt in the first place?

Let me know what are your favorite nondairy foodstuffs in the comments!

Cheers.