The problem with the flavored milk alternatives is that most are full of sugar.
And it sticks to your ribs!
Advice on fasting or limiting certain foods before cataract surgery seems to vary a lot, with some clinics having a general prohibition on non-clear liquids (including milk, orange juice etc.) within a certain number of hours before the procedure. Possibly there’s concern that lactose intolerance might increase the likelihood of nausea/vomiting/aspiration in conjunction with patient sedation.
One study questioned the need for any pre-cataract surgery fasting.
There’s a reason for my disclaimer.
Isn’t dairy milk full of sugar, too, i.e. lactose?
Isn’t lactose a good sugar, such as fructose, found in fruits?
A cup of whole milk has 12 grams of sugar.
A cup of Blue Diamond Vanilla “Almond Breeze” (which I’ve had before) has 14 grams of sugar, with 12 grams added.
The prevailing wisdom is that “added” sugar is best avoided, but I can’t quite see why. Here is a blog from Harvard Medical School on the subject:
Natural and added sugars are metabolized the same way in our bodies. But for most people, consuming natural sugars in foods such as fruit is not linked to negative health effects, since the amount of sugar tends to be modest and is “packaged” with fiber and other healthful nutrients. On the other hand, our bodies do not need, or benefit from, eating added sugar.
So that seems to imply that the added sugars in the almond milk are worse that the natural lactose in milk. However, it goes on to say:
In short, it’s best to limit all sources of added sugar to within the recommended intake level. For most people, one type of sugar isn’t better than another.
So despite the fact that the almond milk tastes a lot sweeter (again, to me it’s like drinking a melted milkshake) the total amount of sugar isn’t much different, and the calories are much less (80 calories in a cup compared to about 150 in a cup of whole milk). If you drink 2% milk, it is the same number of sugars but 20 calories less, but still more than the almond milk. So, I take back what I said before about the almond milk. It tasted a lot more sugary but ultimately it’s not that different, and seems to be healthier overall. (And you can drink the unsweetened vanilla almond milk which has 0 sugars, but ick.)
I almost agree – I haven’t had cereal in at least a decade and I don’t think abstaining for a couple of days is going to be hardship for @dougrb. I just don’t agree about the jam – needless sugar! Toast by itself with lots of butter is just a fine treat. If one must have something on toast, toast some bagels and put Boursin herb & garlic cheese on it, but I generally have that instead of bacon and eggs, not with it. I have some grape jam in the fridge that will probably go bad because I find it just too sweet.
On a different topic, I thought I might have opined earlier on my attitude to milk, but apparently not. My attitude is that I don’t drink it because I don’t like it, although as I said earlier, I did consume it as a child. But I still take cream in my coffee and love certain milk products like cheese, sour cream, yogurt, and tzatziki. Tzatziki, incidentally, makes a nice dip for a lot of things besides just souvlaki. In a great example of cross-cultural harmony, it works well as a dip for tortilla chips!
I did a quick Google search after I posted earlier, and I actually found that same Harvard blog post. I too was confused by why the added sugar in the almond milk would somehow be worse than the naturally occurring sugar in dairy milk. I mean, it’s all calories either way, right?
On reflection, I think the key is this:
the amount of sugar tends to be modest and is “packaged” with fiber and other healthful nutrients
So it’s not the sugar itself, it’s the amount and the absence of nutrients. Most food and drink with added sugar lacks what you need and adds too much of the sugar. But in the case of the almond milk, it only adds a slightly greater amount of sugar than what real milk would have, has fewer calories, and plenty of vitamins and other nutrients, so that rule of thumb doesn’t apply.
I really feel bad about slandering almond milk earlier.
Now that you mention that, I have heard that drinking orange juice (and I guess other fruit juices) isn’t really as good for us as we tend to think, for the reason you stated. By just drinking the juice rather than eating the entire orange you getting all the sugar but none of the fiber.
Yeah. From a low-carb perspective, added sugar is per se bad. Likewise all juices. In each case it’s concentrated sugar to the relative exclusion of any mitigating nutrients, fiber, fillers, etc.
The difference between eating poison & mainlining it.
Add a little Vodka and it will counteract all that bad stuff.
Used to be a dairy farm up the highway a few miles. Kinda miss the smell of silage in the morning. 
I’d eat breakfast with you any day!
Seriously, I have never understood the attraction of cereal, of any kind. Blechh.
And in most cases literally the packaging.
Sugar naturally in fruits, for example, is packaged inside cell walls as well as along with fiber. Both impact the rate and location that the sugar is absorbed into the blood stream. Remove those things and you functionally are closer to sugar in water.
The “milk matrix” is somewhat similar.
For milk, control of postprandial glycemic responses appears to be multifaceted, including a controlled rate of gastric emptying, a rate of glucose and galactose uptake into the bloodstream controlled by enzymatic hydrolysis, as well as stimulated insulin secretion to enhance uptake of blood glucose from the bloodstream. Altogether, this allows milk to deliver comparatively high levels of carbohydrate with limited glycemic responses.
Added sugar generally has none of those packaging and matrix effects.
I’m not hating on almond milk, but better to eat some almonds. It’s not just all calories either way and I know of no reason to conclude that almond milk is overall healthier.
(Personally I like the taste of plain kefir but that’s just me.)
Do you have anything explicitly saying this? Your link is helpful but is rather dense and a bit vague (which I guess you would expect from an abstract).
Not that I’m doubting you; rather you’re confirming assumptions I’ve had about this subject prior to this thread, and having it written out by an authoritative source would be useful.
I mean, this is kind of vague:
For plant-based drinks positioned as milk alternatives, however, compositional differences (including carbohydrate type and concentration) as well as matrix factors limiting control over gastric emptying and insulin secretion can, in some cases, lead to much stronger glycemic responses, which are undesirable in relation to non-communicable diseases, such as type-2 diabetes.
“Some cases”… Was that 4 people? Is this something significant enough that it should necessarily impact everyone?
That’s actually the sort of thing I was trying to find, but I mostly ended up with health fad blogs that I don’t consider useful at all. That Harvard Medical School article was the closest I could find to an authoritative source that said things plainly, but it states that sugar is sugar and it’s the amount that matters, not the kind of sugar it is. If there is more to the story, that would be great to see.
Are you asking for an article specific to milk v almond milk, or the general principle regarding added sugar vs sugar in whole or minimally processed foods?
From the cited article is this:
The results showed that bovine milk had the lowest glycemic index (GI = 47) followed by calcium-enriched organic soy drink (GI = 48). The rest of the plant-based milk alternatives had a glycemic index between 49 and 64, with the exception of rice drinks and coconut drink, which showed very high estimated GI values, even up to 100. The high estimated glycemic index in these plant-based drinks may be due to the added sugars or sweeteners [7].
Honestly I don’t think those differences (other than the rice and coconut) matter much.
The bigger deal is the difference between sugar contained eating say a cup of cherries vs a cookie with the same total sugar content.
It is not the kind of sugar. It is how it is packaged.
FWIW, I have compared half-and-half to vanilla almond milk in my coffee with a CGM and the cream gets no spike where the almond milk creates as much as a 20 point spike. I assume the milk fat is a moderator.
Here’s a plain English cite explaining it.