Rice Milk: The Other White Drink

Do you keep hearing and seeing those milk ads that boast about milk and how many vitamins, minerals, and protein are in it? Well that's all true but the milk company is also a multimillion dollar company that has a lot of close connections with other big profit companies. The fact is people should not be drinking milk, plain and simple. There is no reason for human beings to be drinking milk once we're adults. Think about it, other mammals drink milk when they're born to get essential nutrients to grow and develop. After they grow and develop do they keep drinking milk? Do they keep drinking milk from another completely different animal? It's strange if you think about it in that respect but the milk industry wants us to believe that we need milk to survive and live a healthy long lasting life. Well I'm here to give you some milk alternatives that give you the same or even more nutrients than regular cow's milk, that originate from all natural sources such as rice, hemp, soy, and almond. The product that I believe is the best all around is rice milk, but others swear by almond or soy but when I compared rice milk to the others I found that it had better nutrients and a healthier calorie consistency.

Before I start to talk about milk alternatives, let me educate you on why cow's milk is bad contrary to what you've been told in the past. According to the book "Skinny Bitch", milk has "been linked to a host of other problems, including acne, anemia, anxiety, arthritis, ADD, ADHD, fibromyalgia, headaches, heatburn, indigestion, irritable bowel movement, joint pain, osteoporosis, poor immune function, allergies, ear infections, colic, obesity, heart disease, diabetes, autism, Crohn's disease, breast and prostate cancers, and ovarian cancer" (Freedman, Barnouin 57-58). So plain and simple, milk spreads disease instead of warding off disease and making us healthier. In a nutshell, we shouldn't be drinking milk from a cow. Another reason to not drink cow's milk is because it contains a toxic substance called Dioxin. All of the steroids, antibiotics, pesticides, and hormones you also consume when you drink cow's milk. It's basically the same as eating the cow, you get everything that's in the cow's system. With such a high demand of milk, farmers have transformed into mass producing fat cats. They inject the cattle with so many hormones and antibiotics that the cow's udder becomes so big in order to keep up with the high demand of milk production. The udders are so sore and bruised that they in turn become infected with disease and that disease is leaking into the milk that we drink (60).

Since all of the gross and unpleasant information about cow's milk is out of the way I can tell you about some milk alternatives that have even better nutrients and better overall taste than cow's milk. My favorite alternative is Rice Milk. Now you have to be careful when buying this product and the other milk alternative products in the supermarket. A word of caution when purchasing these products is don't buy the regular, but rather the unsweetened product. Unsweetened does not mean however that the product isn't sweet and is rather bland and unsatisfying, on the contrary, the unsweetened products do not have any added sugar and they contain vanilla extract which makes the product taste more naturally sweet. Unsweetened vanilla rice milk is a good choice when choosing a milk alternative. It has only 45 calories per one cup serving, as opposed to skim milk which has between 90-100 calories per serving. Rice milk also has zero grams of saturated fat and only 2 grams of total fat. It also has several important nutrients such as 20% calcium, along with 20% Vitamin D, 15% Phosphorus, 8% Vitamin A, and 20% Vitamin B12. One of the best elements that rice milk has over regular milk is simply the fiber. In one cup of rice milk you get 6 grams of fiber which is 23% of your daily amount. Regular milk doesn't even come close to that. So with half the calories, both Vitamin D and Calcium enriched, an all natural and organic source from rice, and 23% of your daily fiber, it's no question that unsweetened rice milk is a better alternative to regular cow's milk. The price of rice milk is also cheaper than the price of cow's milk. You can purchase rice milk at any supermarket that includes an organic section or a Whole Foods Supermarket. The Whole Foods 365 rice milk product is only $1.69 per 32 fl oz. container!