Tag Archives: Food and drink

The rise of soya milk

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Derided by many as a strange-tasting alternative to cow’s milk, sales of the product have grown rapidly over the last couple of years, as the quality of the liquid has improved and consumers have embraced its relatively healthy status.

Sales of dairy free milk hit more than £136 million during 2010, compared with almost £103m in 2008 and £87 million in 2006, according to Nielsen, a market research company which tracks food and drink sales.

Soya is now regularly bought by over 4 million of Britain’s 26 million households compared to 3.4 million in 2006.

Starbucks, the leading coffee chain, said that it had completely taken off in the last two years, from being a niche product offered to people who asked especially for it, to now being regularly on the menu. The company now uses more than 500,000 litres of soya milk a year in its British shops, and this summer will start selling a soya frappuccino, a version of its cold, milky drink that it sells when the weather is hot.

Soya milk

Soya milk

Claire Waugh, head of brand development at Starbucks UK, said; “A few years ago, we noticed that customers here were starting to ask for soya milk and after offering the option, we’ve seen the trend keep on growing. More people want drinks made exactly to their taste and in trials we saw that it was one of the most popular choices to customise the new frappuccino.”

There has been a steady increase in the number of consumers, including children, diagnosed as lactose intolerant, with the NHS estimating that 5 per cent of all Britons and as many as 100 per cent of Asian-Britons suffering from the condition, which can cause stomach pain.


However, many people who have started to drink the product are doing so because they perceive it be healthier or better for the environment, according to Alpro, the country’s biggest manufacturer of soya milk.

John Allaway, the commercial director at Alpro, said: “Five years ago it didn’t taste like dairy. But the quality has much improved.

“A lot of people who now drink it do so because they like the fact it is a plant-based product not an animal-based one. It’s better for the environment and it’s becoming trendy.”

It has less saturated fat, more protein and fewer calories compared with cow’s milk, and though its production uses up less carbon and water, many environmentalists have complained that large tracts of forests in South America have been destroyed in order to plant soy beans.

Processed foods may lower childrens IQ

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They say you are what you eat, and now a new study suggests that a childhood diet high in “junk” food may result in a lower IQ.

But a diet high in vitamins and nutrients may have the opposite effect, resulting in a higher IQ – and the healthier the diet, the greater the effect.

The study looked at data collected by the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC), which tracked the food and drink habits of around 14,000 children born in 1991 and 1992.

Three dietary patterns were identified: “processed” high in fats and sugar intake; “traditional” high in meat and vegetable intake; and “health conscious” high in salad, fruit and vegetables, rice and pasta. Scores were calculated for each pattern for each child.

Processed food

Processed food

Once other possible factors had been accounted for, the researchers found that a predominantly processed food diet at the age of 3 was associated with a lower IQ at the age of 8.5, irrespective of whether the diet improved after that age – in fact each 1 point reduction in the diet “score” was associated with a drop in IQ of 1.67 points.

Health diets resulted in a higher IQ, with each 1 point increase in diet score linked to an increase in IQ of 1.2 points.


But diet between the ages of 4 and 7 had no effect on subsequent IQ scores. The study obtained complete scores for over 4,000 participants in ALSPAC.

These results echo previous ALSPAC research showing an association between early childhood diet and later behaviour and school performance, and the authors note that “it is possible that good nutrition during this period may encourage optimal brain growth.”

Full details of the study are published online in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.