Giving up milk.....how did you do it?

[titsintiers]

I have always drank lots of milk in lots of mugs of tea and coffee throughout the day. I know it's not good for me but lockdown has lead to an increase in quantity.

For those of you who've given up, how did you manage? Do you drink substitutes? I like almond milk, but not as much and it's not great for the environment.

I like peppermint tea but all the fruit one's taste the same. Any recommendations for alternatives?

I used to drink tea by the gallon but moved to a predominantly keto diet, so moved to black coffee, and now don’t miss milk at all.
Even cut it out for my mammoth milk drinker DS1. His behavior improved immeasurably within a week (no other changes) and doctor believes it’s due to the casein in dairy.
Anyway, I don’t miss it at all, never have. Don’t miss cheese either.
Mine has always been a health choice because I don’t believe dairy is healthy (certainly not here with the shite US dairy products), and now it’s far more an animal welfare decision for me.
I go through phases of eat high quality meat but eat a mostly plant based diet now.
Any milk I use is Planet Oat (extra creamy) which for me tastes the closest to 2% Dairy.

Minor Figures oat milk was a game changer for me. Amazing in tea and coffee. The only thing I would find it difficult to have with is cereal but that’s not a problem as I don’t eat it anyway.

@SageMist

I think it's really important that young women understand how important Calcium is to having healthy bones later in life. My mother stopped drinking milk and vastly cut down on butter and cheese too, when I was a teenager. She didn't eat enough calcium-rich foods to compensate, because she didn't understand enough about nutrition. Now she has osteoporosis.

I think that there are far more calcium entriched substitute dairy foods and other foods available now than when you were a teenager, so it could well be that giving up all dairy affected your mum's calcium levels.

If people were to give up dairy now it would be much easier to find other sources of calcium rich foods.

There are so many better options for calcium than dairy please stop trying to scaremongering people into doing what's right and ditching the dairy!

Adults do not need cows milk
"Calcium and Milk | The Nutrition Source | Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health" www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/what-should-you-eat/calcium-and-milk/

There you go again for those who seem to have missed it

RampantIvy pasteurised milk is processed of course. How processed cow's milk is depends where you get your milk and whether you consider the cow turning grass to milk to be processing - in which case everything is processed as plants turn seeds and sunlight and water and trace minerals in soil to food, but obviously that's not the usual meaning of processed food.

How much calcium or protein or vitimin D is in milk substitutes depends on how much is added during processing. They're mostly a concoction with a few percent of the named ingredients.

Generally its easy to substitute an actual real ingredient in cooking or just miss out the milk completely, the substitutes are cleverly marketed though...

Plus people eat a lot of foods now as part of their general diet that they didn’t in the past or not as much - for example broccoli and tahini/sesame seeds are good sources of calcium. I eat hummus and broccoli several times a week (not together!) which my parents and grandparents wouldn’t have done at my age I don’t think.

No matter what your stance, you'll never find a good alertnaitvr for mature cheddar cheese. And vegans who offer suggestions of 'cheese' that 'tastes the same' clearly wouldn't know a good cheese if it flew into their face from a gigantic cheese board in the sky. It's the one thing I truly miss - I was a huge cheese fiend and now can't stomach the idea of macoroni cheese or lasagne made with substitutes (and I've tried a huge number of recipes)

@Dollpiglet

No matter what your stance, you'll never find a good alertnaitvr for mature cheddar cheese. And vegans who offer suggestions of 'cheese' that 'tastes the same' clearly wouldn't know a good cheese if it flew into their face from a gigantic cheese board in the sky. It's the one thing I truly miss - I was a huge cheese fiend and now can't stomach the idea of macoroni cheese or lasagne made with substitutes (and I've tried a huge number of recipes)

Agreed, I try to replace with alternatives, rather than faux cheese. So lasagne made with cashew cream for example, is much much nicer than any of the faux cheese

@Dollpiglet

No matter what your stance, you'll never find a good alertnaitvr for mature cheddar cheese. And vegans who offer suggestions of 'cheese' that 'tastes the same' clearly wouldn't know a good cheese if it flew into their face from a gigantic cheese board in the sky. It's the one thing I truly miss - I was a huge cheese fiend and now can't stomach the idea of macoroni cheese or lasagne made with substitutes (and I've tried a huge number of recipes)

I’m quite into violife epic mature cheddar at the moment. I haven’t eaten cheese in about 4 years so perhaps I’m at the point where I’ve forgotten what it tasted like.

Oh and I’d only have it with a few things. On top of nachos, beans on toast, a slice with a burger etc.

It’s 100% not a perfect replacement.

There are only two nice cheese substitutes IMO, mozzarisella and vegan applewood. But now dairy cheese smells disgusting to me so I don’t miss it anymore (I liked cheese even though I didn’t like milk).

Milk is very good for you, dont give it up because you've self diagnosed a problem.
Also the fake milk substitutes are incredibly bad for the environment, ultra high processed and contain 90% water. There is no such thing as "oat milk" , it's water, oats and added chemicals.

@MikeHat

Milk is very good for you, dont give it up because you've self diagnosed a problem. Also the fake milk substitutes are incredibly bad for the environment, ultra high processed and contain 90% water. There is no such thing as "oat milk" , it's water, oats and added chemicals.

"chemicals" lol

@BiBabbles Cows milk should be more expensive. It is a loss leader and supermarkets are constantly trying to drive the price down. As a result small, ethically run dairy farms across the UK have gone out of business in their thousands leading to an increase of ‘super-dairies’. Milk should definitely be more expensive.

Yes many non-dairy 'milks' are fortified. But a lot a people on this thread are suggesting dropping milk and not substituting with anything. If you are going to do that then you need to understand how else you are going to get enough calcium in your diet to protect yourselves from osteoporosis in later life.

@MikeHat

Milk is very good for you, dont give it up because you've self diagnosed a problem. Also the fake milk substitutes are incredibly bad for the environment, ultra high processed and contain 90% water. There is no such thing as "oat milk" , it's water, oats and added chemicals.

They're better for the environment

I think the substitutes are wholly overrated and drink black coffee and black tea instead.

The second sounds weird, but as long as you don't stew the bag, it's still nice and even more refreshing than standard builders' brew.

I like soya milk not as a substitute, but as something in its own right. I do eat a huge amount of Japanese/Korean food, though, so it kind of suits my tastes to have it because as part of the same range of flavours (does that make sense? I'm not sure).

The standard fruit teas do almost all taste the same because they're all 95% rosehip, but if you try Teapigs, for example, they don't, because they aren't bulking the bags out to cost as little as possible.

You can also do things like infusing water with fruit.

@Schrutesbeets it is the same industry, but also the manure from dairy and beef farms is widely used as a fertiliser in arable and fresh produce. As you say ‘IT’S THE SAME INDUSTRY’

@1940s Male calves are not routinely killed at birth in the UK anymore. It was officially banned in January by red tractor farmers (95% of the dairy industry are covered by this scheme). In addition less than 10% of calves born in the UK are male due to sexed semen being used.

Surely everyone now knows that eating less meat and dairy is better for the environment???

And we don't need it to survive and be healthy?

It's not essential!

Yes vegan cheese isn't very good but it's a small price to pay to not hurt animals and do a little to help the environment

Priorities people

I'm not saying everyone should go vegan it might not be so easy for everyone but even cutting down and not being so reliant on these foods can help also

@RampantIvy you are right, under the NOVA food classification system milk is unprocessed and oat/soya milk etc… are ultra processed.

I didn't eat any dairy produce for around 5 years whilst breastfeeding my dairy allergic children. I found it fairly easy, though to be fair, having been allergic myself as a child I'd never really consumed a lot anyway. A pint of milk never gets finished in our house anyway - it will go off before it's all drunk as I'm the only one who has it and I only have it in tge 1 cup of tea I have a day. I just swapped to drinking fruit teas whilst I was dairy free, I never used any milk alternatives.
Cheese was the only thing I really missed and I have never found an alternative that's convincing.
I was probably the healthiest I have ever been when I was dairy free, but I think that was a function of eating virtually no processed food at all, as cows milk appears in so much prepared and processed food. We still eat fairly well now as my DS still has multiple allergies but I have let bad habits creep back into my own diet unfortunately. Being dairy free really made me look at what I was eating and benefitted my health, but my approach was to eat naturally dairy free meals rather than substitutes, if that makes sense.

Agree with @MrsAvocet - I don’t substitute dairy with vegan cheeses or anything, simply because I don’t miss them.
If you’re eating a lot of broccoli, tofu, spinach, sesame etc, there’s plenty of calcium to ensure you’re not at risk of osteoporosis.

It's just milk I want to reduce/ eliminate.

Thanks for all the tips. I'll try and go cold turkey I think. On Monday.

On the processing front: I’ve made my own oat milk in the past- you just soak the oats in water overnight, whiz them up in a blender in the morning, and strain them through muslin- voila! Oat milk! I stopped, because it’s a colossal faff, but scrutinising the ingredients and blurb on the back of the oat milk cartons, the process of making commercial oat milk doesn’t look that dissimilar.

Meanwhile, commercial cow’s milk is pasteurised and then homogenised ( which I guess is pretty close to being whizzed up in a blender!). It has a taste and texture completely different to cow’s milk in its natural state- in fact, I stopped finding homogenised cow’s milk palatable years ago, after having lived for a while in an eco village in Italy, where we drank raw milk straight from the cow, which tasted thinner, sweeter and far more digestible. So I don’t buy the “Commercial dairy milk is somehow less processed than plant milk” argument one little bit.

Agree with the dairy industry being horrific. I also agree you should try to cut it out for at least a few weeks completely and see if it helps your skin condition. For me, it cleared up all my (b)acne, my nails got stronger, my chronic post-nasal drip disappeared and my digestion improved. You need to cut out ALL dairy to test this though, not just the obvious - cut out milk, cheese, yoghurt, yes, but also check every crisp packet, loaf of bread, pasta sauce, supermarkets like to sneak milk into everything!

I also recommend Oatly Barista (grey carton, in the long-life section) or making your own (you just need a blender - but admittedly I don't love homemade oat milk in my coffee so only use it for cereal, porridge, etc.).

Oat milk is environmentally one of the best and it's very good nutritionally.

I am quite stunned that people still think that without milk you won't get enough calcium. That was a marketing ploy decades ago! Try green veg, tofu, kidney beans, tomatoes, nuts, to name a few (without the added cholesterol). Milk is also known to increase your chances of osteoporosis, not the other way around. Considering many studies are funded by those who benefit from it, and don't have to publish their findings if they don't, it's unsurprising that the massive dairy industry doesn't talk about it, but I heard of it years ago so it must have been in the news at some point - I remember it saying that basically countries with a lower/no dairy intake have significantly lower osteoporosis rates than those with a higher dairy consumption. Somehow it was depleting calcium stores, or perhaps the wrong type, or something - I can't remember exactly but if you still consume dairy then it's worth looking into.