Almond Milk: Kill, F*ck, Marry

Kill, f*ck, marry. Chances are you played it passing time on the school bus or at parties before flip cup was a thing. While your chosen subjects were likely boy band members or Friends characters, we at MUD played a round with alternative milks. Weird? Maybe, but we found it stoked a lively conversation about being more prudent about what goes into all beverages we consume.

Our team agrees that making almond milk or other dairy-free milks at home is the ideal option. If you were the person who made your own sourdough during quarantine, you may already also be a homemade almond milk expert by now.   

If you aren’t preparing your own milk, here’s our KFM.

Almond Breeze, you showed us the way to quit cow’s milk and reduce inflammation in our diet. You were the first almond milk we saw in grocery stores back before mud was born and we were still riding the coffee train proudly.

 While we’re thankful for you being the gateway drug into nut milks, your unsweetened vanilla almond milk contains “natural flavors”. Now that we’re cozy with all the ingredients in MUD, it sorta freaks us out drinking anything with an ingredient that could be, well, really anything.

“Natural flavors” is nearly synonymous with “artificial flavors” but they are derived from substances found in nature like plants and animals. Even “natural flavors”, however, are created by chemists in a lab and can be genetically modified (GMO).

 This leaves us singing bye, bye, bye N’SYNC style.

F*CK Califia Farms

Califia Farms almond milk we’d swipe right on. It’s the brand that a lot of baristas use when creating sexy almond milk lattes, hot or iced. 

But even Califia contains gellan gum. Here at MUD HQ we’re aware that carrageenan is something we want to avoid as it has been linked to intestinal inflammation and cancer. Problem is that a lot of companies are now replacing it with gellan gum. While safer than carrageenan, it can cause unnecessary bloating and gas.

It was fun, Califia. But it’s not me, it’s you.

MARRY Three Trees

If you aren’t preparing your own nut milk (guilty), look for a USDA certified organic version like Three Trees to avoid crops treated with synthetic pesticides. Choose brands without added sugar, natural flavors, or carrageenan. Find milks that don’t include thickeners like gellan gum.

 With reverse osmosis filtered water, organic almonds, organic vanilla extract, and organic vanilla beans as it’s only ingredients, Three Trees is the real deal. Although it’s not perfect homemade almond milk, it’s perfect for us.

Topics for our next office round of Kill, F*ck, Marry?

Source: Food Babe https://foodbabe.com/what-are-the-healthiest-non-dairy-milks-to-drink/