Plant-based milks—what’s best?

You asked us to look at some popular plant milks and their health properties, and we said we’d do a main feature, so here it is!

We’ll also give a quick nod to environmental considerations at the end too (they might not be quite what you expect!). That said, as a health and productivity newsletter, we’ll be focusing on the health benefits.

While we can give a broad overview, please note that individual brands may vary, especially in two important ways:

• Pro: many (most?) brands of plant milks fortify their products with extra vitamins and minerals, especially vitamin D and calcium.
• Con: some brands also add sugar.

So, by all means use this guide to learn about the different plants’ properties, and/but still do check labels later.

Alternatively, consider making your own!

• Pros: no added sugar + cheaper
• Cons: no added vitamins and minerals + some equipment required

Almond milk

Almond milk is low in carbs and thus good for a carb-controlled diet. It’s also high in vitamin E and a collection of minerals.

Oat milk

Oats are one of the healthiest “staple foods” around, and while drinking oat milk doesn’t convey all the benefits, it does a lot. It also has one of the highest soluble fiber contents of any milk, which is good for reducing LDL (bad) cholesterol levels.

See for example: Consumption of oat milk for 5 weeks lowers serum cholesterol and LDL cholesterol in free-living men with moderate hypercholesterolemia

Coconut milk

Coconut has a higher fat content than most plant milks, but also contains medium-chain triglycerides (MCTs). These raise HDL (good) cholesterol levels.

Read the study: How well do plant based alternatives fare nutritionally compared to cow’s milk?

Hemp milk

Being made from hemp seeds that contain a lot of protein and healthy fats (including omega-3 and omega-6), hemp milk packs a nutritious punch. It’s carb-free. It’s also THC-free, in case you were wondering, which means no, it does not have psychoactive effects.

Pea milk

It’s very high in protein, and contains an array of vitamins and minerals. It’s not very popular yet, so there isn’t as much research about it. This 2021 study found that it had the nutritional profile the closest to cow’s milk (beating soy by a narrow margin) and praised it as a good alternative for those with a soy allergy.

This is Research Review Monday so we try to stick to pure science, but for your interest… here’s an interesting pop-science article (ostensibly in affiliation with the pea milk brand, Ripple) about the nutritional qualities of their pea milk specifically, which uses particularly nutrient-dense yellow peas, plus some extra vitamin and mineral fortifications:

Read: Ripple Milk: 6 Reasons Why You Should Try Pea Milk

Soy milk

Perhaps the most popular plant milk, and certainly usually the cheapest in stores. It’s high in protein, similar to cow’s milk. In fact, nutritionally, it’s one of the closest to cow’s milk without involving cows as a middleman. (Did you know three quarters of all soy in the world is grown to feed to livestock, not humans? Now you do).

And no, gentlemen-readers, it won’t have any feminizing effects. The human body can’t use the plant estrogens in soy for that. It does give some isoflavone benefits though, which are broadly good for everyone’s health. See for example this research review with 439 sources of its own:

Read: Soy and Health Update: Evaluation of the Clinical and Epidemiologic Literature

Quick note on flavor: nut milks have the flavor of the nut they were made from. Coconut milk tastes of coconut. The other milks listed above don’t have much of a flavor—which in many cases may be what you want.

Note on environmental considerations:

A lot of us try to be as socially responsible as reasonably possible in our choices, so this may be an influencing factor. In a nutshell:

• Oats and Soy are generally grown as vast monocrops, and these are bad for the environment
  • They are still better for the environment than cow’s milk though, as for example most soy is grown to feed to cows, not humans. So including cows in the process means four times as much monocrop farming, plus adds several other environmental issues that are beyond the scope of this newsletter.
• Almonds are particularly resource-intensive when it comes to water use.
  • Still nowhere near as much as cows, though.
• Peas are grown in places that naturally have very high rainfall, so are a good option here. Same generally goes for rice, which didn’t make the cut today. (Nor did hazelnuts, sorry—we can only include so much!)
• Hemp is by far and away the most environmentally friendly, assuming it is grown in a climate naturally conducive to such.
• Making plant milk at home is usually most environmentally friendly, depending on where your ingredients came from.
• Literally any plant milk is much more environmentally friendly than cow’s milk.

See the science for yourself: Reducing food’s environmental impacts through producers and consumers

See also (if you like graphs and charts): Environmental footprints of dairy and plant-based milks

Old Drug, New Tricks?

Modafinil (also known by brand names including Modalert and Provigil) is a dopamine uptake inhibitor.

What does that mean? It means it won’t put any extra dopamine in your brain, but it will slow down the rate at which your brain removes naturally-occuring dopamine.

The result is that your brain will get to make more use of the dopamine it does have.

(dopamine is a neutrotransmitter that allows you to feel wakeful and happy, and perform complex cognitive tasks)

Modafinil is prescribed for treatment of excessive daytime sleepiness. Often that’s caused by shift work sleep disorder, sleep apnea, restless leg syndrome, or narcolepsy.

Read: Overview of the Clinical Uses, Pharmacology, and Safety of Modafinil

Many studies done on humans (rather than rats) have been military experiments to reduce the effects of sleep deprivation:

Click Here To See A Military Study On Modafinil!

They’ve found modafinil to be helpful, and more effective and more long-lasting than caffeine, without the same “crash” later. This is for two reasons:

1) while caffeine works by blocking adenosine (so you don’t feel how tired you are) and by constricting blood vessels (so you feel more ready-for-action), modafinil works by allowing your brain to accumulate more dopamine (so you’re genuinely more wakeful, and you get to keep the dopamine)

2) the biological half-life of modafinil is 12–15 hours, as opposed to 4–8 hours* for caffeine.

*Note: a lot of sources quote 5–6 hours for caffeine, but this average is misleading. In reality, we are each genetically predetermined to be either a fast caffeine metabolizer (nearer 4 hours) or a slow caffeine metabolizer (nearer 8 hours).

What’s a biological half-life (also called: elimination half-life)?

A substance’s biological half-life is the time it takes for the amount in the body to be reduced by exactly half.

For example: Let’s say you’re a fast caffeine metabolizer and you have a double-espresso (containing 100mg caffeine) at 8am.

By midday, you’ll have 50mg of caffeine left in your body. So far, so simple.

By 4pm you might expect it to be gone, but instead you have 25mg remaining (because the amount halves every four hours).

By 8pm, you have 12.5mg remaining.

When midnight comes and you’re tucking yourself into bed, you still have 6.25mg of caffeine remaining from your morning coffee!

Use as a nootropic

Many healthy people who are not sleep-deprived use modafinil “off-label” as a nootropic (i.e., a cognitive enhancer).

Read: Modafinil for cognitive neuroenhancement in healthy non-sleep-deprived subjects: A systematic review

Important Note: modafinil is prescription-controlled, and only FDA-approved for sleep disorders.

To get around this, a lot of perfectly healthy biohackers describe the symptoms of sleep pattern disorder to their doctor, to get a prescription.

We do not recommend lying to your healthcare provider, and nor do we recommend turning to the online “grey market”.

Such websites often use anonymized private doctors to prescribe on an “informed consent” basis, rather than making a full examination. Those websites then dispense the prescribed medicines directly to the patient with no further questions asked (i.e. very questionable practices).

Caveat emptor!

A new mood-brightener?

Modafinil was recently tested head-to-head against Citalapram for the treatment of depression, and scored well:

See its head-to-head scores here!

How does it work? Modafinil does for dopamine what a lot of anti-depressants do for serotonin. Both dopamine and serotonin promote happiness and wakefulness.

This is very promising, especially as modafinil (in most people, at least) has fewer unwanted side-effects than a lot of common anti-depressant medications.