Thursday, April 2, 2009

hemp milk

I found a lovely local coffee shop next door to my work. The barista is from the East Coast and although it took him a while to warm up to me, I think he enjoys talking to me now. We got on the subject of soy milk vs hemp milk after he introduced hemp milk to me and I loved it. On his suggestion I did some research online about soy milk and discovered that it is really not so healthy for you. I was surprised! Soy milk may increase heart disease, cancer, and osteoperosis and decrease one's sex drive, yikes! For all of you that know me personally may know that I can't drink milk because of my recently developed lactose intolerance (it's actually been about 4 years now, wow!).
Hemp milk has a more balanced ratio of oils as seen on the chart at the bottom of this page: http://www.worldpantry.com/cgi-bin/ncommerce3/ExecMacro/livingharvest/hemp101.d2w/report.
So after some research and some very superior hemp vanilla lattes (to my normal soy vanilla lattes) at my local coffee shop I went on a hunt for my own hemp milk at home. I didn't find it at Trader Joe's or Safeway so I went online and found out that a lot of natural food stores hold it. I ended up buying chocolate and original, although I haven't opened the chocolate one yet, so I'll have to let you all know how that goes. It's really good, and actually a nice change because it is not as thick and creamy as soy and much more like cow's milk in consistency and taste (according to someone who hasn't drank a glass of milk in a long long time).
I thought I would bring this to the attention to my blogging community because it was something new that I learned and I know so many of us consume soy on a regular basis. Here are a few more websites that might be helpful to learn about soy and other alternatives to milk:

Mercola
Healing Daily
The Healing Crow

The only problem that I'm having is that very few coffee shops in the Portland area provide hemp, the only one I've found so far is this local coffee shop I've been speaking of: Seven Virtues. Yes, even the famous-but-overhyped Stumptown does not offer hemp yet.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

So how do you milk hemp :) Funny...I'll look it up. Soy also decreases reproduction abilities and is highly processed.

Nice find.....I wonder what we will find wrong with hemp milk in a few years :)

coffee connoisseur said...

Good point. As for now, the tastiness is worth the change alone to me.