Not All Milk is Real Milk

The Food and Drug Administration is taking comments through the month of July on voluntary guidances that would allow imitation and plant-based milk products to use the word milk as long as the company lists information about how the nutrition of that product compares to animal-lactation-derived milk, Senior Vice President of Member Services and Strategic Initiatives with the National Milk Producers Federation Chris Galen.

“We like the latter part of that which is that if you have to compare what is not in oat milk as an example versus what is in real milk, you will see that real milk is the clear champion you know has the pole position with every single comparison whether it's with soy or rice or oats or cashews, you know, whatever the one is this month, it tends to evolve over time as to what's the most popular one, but generally in terms of protein 10 other nutrients and vitamins real milk is consistently the winner.”

Galen says that national milk does not agree that these products can call themselves milk given a long-standing that the Food and Drug Administration has for a definition of milk and he says his organization is trying to head off cheese, yogurt, and other products from using the word milk at the same time aboard cow has come onto the market, which is a lab manufacturer of whey protein, and it is being coined as dairy-free milk.

“Not only is it not milk it does certainly doesn't even qualify as a nutritional product because it doesn't have the same diverse number of nutrients that real milk has.”

Chris Galen with the National Milk Producers Federation.