The soy milk is OK

I still have issues with lactose free milk too. I suspect it's the A1 beta-casein. Australia has a really common breed of cows which make A2 beta-casein which has proline instead of histadine.

I agree: I've settled on soy and I'm okay with it.

Soy milk from an asian grocery store tastes a lot better. Buy the ones that have chinese text on them and make sure it's the refrigerated and perishable kind. Get the organic ones if you can afford it.

Trust me, Chinese people have been perfecting soy milk for thousands of years. It's thoroughly cooked and processed to remove that raw bean taste and weird texture that I've had in a lot of American brands like Silk.

Coconut is my go to, and it usually bakes well. For drinking I go with Unsweetened Vanilla Coconut because it's usually blended better than plain for some reason across multiple brands I've noticed.

I dropped dairy milk simply because of calories/sugar.

They're all fine with me. Almond and Soy. Also pisses my dad off. He has oil corps, meat, and dairy where a personality should've been. Snowflake. So that's fun.

For me I found it wasn't the lactose, but the amount of fat in the milk that gave me the rumblies. Eating certain dishes with a lots of fat gave me the same sort of feeling.

Look into bile acid malabsorption (BAM). It's surprisingly common. In the U.S. you don't commonly use the SeHCAT machines so they prescribe cholestyramine and see if it helps. Give it a go. Very few side effects and you have a lot to gain if it works. Plus if you take it long term you actually reduce your cholesterol levels.
I'll keep an eye out for that. I am trying to put on weight so I do end up eating a lot of fat. Maybe I switch them out for more carbs.
- Best of luck to you!
- I've tried a few different diets for the opposite reason.
  Fat alone makes me feel stuffed and not wanting to eat enough.
  Carbs+fat makes it really easy for me to eat too much.
- Nice. Good luck!
- I seem to recall that fat intake is not as "fattening" as carb intake. Both the carbs and fat you eat are used for energy first, which means that your body has to process the fats into carbs first - which takes energy itself. The surplus of either is converted and stored as fat.
Yes, I was going to say generally milk labeled as lactose-free really shouldn’t have any noticeable amounts of lactose in it, so if someone’s still having trouble then lactose might not be the cause. I have heard relatively recently about something called A2 milk that doesn’t have an A1 protein which is found primarily in cow’s milk but not in as many other mammalian milk, including not in human milk. It looks like it might help some people for whom lactose-free cow’s milk still doesn’t solve digestion issues, but the evidence might not be very conclusive. I haven’t tried it myself; lactose-free works for me.
i have ibs so it makes those things more intense for me, i get the same thing with milk, plus i think im mildly lactose intolerant. something like "flavoured" milk doesnt cause a reaction though,
High fat diets can help facilitate LPS (a bad, fat-soluble, inflammatory molecule) from gram negative bacteria in the gut into the bloodstream which can heighten systemic inflammation (endotoxemia). I feel as though that's a common issue these days that not many people may know about.

Do any of these milk alternatives behave like milk when you cook with them? Like, could I make a gravy or sauce with oat milk?

If you end up liking oat milk you should try making it yourself. It's ridiculously cheap and easy. It doesn't last nearly as long without the preservatives of store bought, but you can stagger making small batches to match your usage if needed.

oat milk is my go-to milk alternative, I didn't like soy milk, nor almond milk. But it's such a shame that 1 liter of oat milk costs nearly 3 times as much as 1 liter of 'regular' milk.

I say it's the fat content that make it my favorite

almond milk? theres cashew milk, and macadamia milk. theres also Lactose-free milk. certain health food grocery stories will sell the alternative milks, theres also rice milk.

I said goodbye to cow's milk decades ago. My tip: mix oat milk & soy milk 50/50. Don't drink "Barista" oat/soy milk on its own, it tastes weird.

“Full fat” Oatly. This is the way.

I'm not a vegan or vegetarian, so that's my disclaimer.

I've tried numerous "milk alternatives" over the years, and many different brands of each. That's particularly true for soy milk since there are so many brands in the USA and it's been commonly, and easily available in my region for 3+ decades.

Based on that, I have to say that soy milk is, for me, consistently my least favorite option in terms of taste.

Of the easily available stuff, almond milk is my favorite, but I see so much hate for it online in terms of environmental harm that I finally just said fuck it, I'm going back to real milk, at least it's cheaper.

My favorite that I've tried so far was hemp milk. I don't recall the brand but years ago I found a brand that did chocolate hemp seed milk that was so good I swear they must've put a dab of fentanyl or nicotine in it to keep people coming back.

Don't buy into the anti-almond milk bullshit, it's propaganda. It still takes about 3x less water to produce per gallon than dairy milk, and that's not accounting for the numerous other ecological issues with cattle farming. It may have a higher environmental cost than other plant milks, but it's still leagues better than going back to cow juice.
- It still takes about 3x less water to produce per gallon than dairy milk,
  I haven't found compelling evidence to support this claim

Fwiw, my kid grew up with a dairy allergy. Most of it was soy milk, but he likes oat milk much more. Probably doesn’t help that we always got unsweetened soy milk

What I do is take lactose tablets when I have dairy.

Worth a try. I miss pizza.

Next Milk or Not Milk are both alternatives, using various plant based stuff. They are the closest to the real milk texture and flavour.

Almon milk. Delicious.

I always thought soy milk was pretty good, once I got past the fact that it tastes different. It's different, not bad, but I feel like there has been about four decades worth of jokes about how soy milk is gross that has cemented the idea that it tastes "off" for many people.

It's actually pretty easy to make yourself, too. I do that now and then. Makes it even more satisfying to drink.

I'm not certified lactose intolerant, but I take lactaid/lactase enzyme when I eat a bunch of pizza or other lactose-heavy meals. It really helps in general, even if you are not totally intolerant. I use oatmilk for coffee bc I think it tastes sweet enough not to use sugar too.

I’ve tried soy, almond, rice, and oat milk. Of those oat milk is the only one that doesn’t taste or feel off to me, but it gives me the gut gurgles. Oh well, I was never big on milk as anything but a vehicle for cereal.

Does oatmeal give you any trouble?
I have a feeling it could be some of the additives in oat milk that are the culprit.
- Usually not at all! I haven’t looked into any of the additives but that wouldn’t surprise me.

Cashew milk is the best IMO. Store bought is ok, but homemade is amazing and really easy. You toast and salt them, then add a handful to a (high-powered) blender full of water. You don't even have to strain cashew milk because it barely has any fiber. It's got a lot of fat, so you need to store it in a container that's shakeable because it will separate in the fridge. You can use less water if you need heavy cream for something.

So even lactose free milk makes me queasy, not the first time but if I drink it every day for a few days (e.g with cereal or in a shake)

Both oat milk and pea protein milk gave me weird intestinal cramps after a few weeks of drinking them.

I really dislike the taste of soy milk. (I don’t mind tofu, but to me it’s weird in coffee or cereal)

So I’ve settled on unsweetened vanilla almond milk. It’s the local store brand.

soy has that wierd aftertaste
God bless ya, I tried drinking unsweetened almond milk after I got diagnosed diabetic and I thought my taste buds stopped working because it tasted like nothing. Not in the way that water "tastes like nothing," but like, in a way where the only stimulus I got was mouthfeel. It was weird.

When I can't get my hands on lactose-free regular milk I get coconut milk. I have tried lots of alternatives and Coconut is my favorite. I find the flavors strong in the oat, soy, and almond milks, so unless I am baking or making something with super strong flavors, I find them to overpower too much

I’ve always heard soy milk isn’t really that good for you; something about estrogen hormones. But I’ve always just used Almond milk back when I was still married. It’s pretty good too.

That one is a load of right-wing propaganda believe it or not.
Soy contains a plant estrogen that doesn't really affect humans at all, and the general benefits definitely outweigh any negative effects that might be happening
Source: Harvard school of public health
Oat milk is way tastier though
- I appreciate the insights. I never drank soy anyway, so it never concerned me.
Almond milk has almost no protein, as odd as that is since almonds have a lot of protein themselves. Somewhere in the process it's lost. I don't like milk substitutes that reduce the positive parts of drinking milk.
Silk used to make an almond, cashew, and pea protein milk that hit all the markers; no lactose, almost all the protein, and way less sugar (something as a diabetic I was also looking for). Unfortunately, that one disappeared.
Now it's all Fairlife for me. No lactose, all the protein, and half the sugar of regular milk (not as low as some other options though). Good enough. And tasty!
- I don't know if you have Kroger near you (or one of their subsidiaries) but the Carbmaster brand they sell is good, and only comes out to 3 grams of carbs per 240ml (8oz glass), which is half of what fairlife has. I started buying it when I got diagnosed diabetic. I don't eat much cereal anymore but when I do, the milk still tastes good.
I learned about it in school, and you'd have to a drink a huge amount of it to matter at all. There are some edge cases (which may have been proven wrong in the last 15 years) where the estrogen-like compound can cause issues with certain cancers and such. But please do not take this as truth bc I have not looked at it in a lifetime of health science research.