A Nutrition Comparison of Regular Milk and Soy Milk

There are many reasons that a person may not drink milk, perhaps they do not care for the taste or maybe they are allergic to it or perhaps lactose intolerant or their reason for not drinking milk is because they are vegan. I personally have a mild allergy to dairy so I really try and limit the amount of milk that I drink, minus when I was pregnant, one of the beverages that I have drank for calcium is soy milk. I finally decided to analyze soy milk when I had my baby was born and I began nursing because I wanted to see which were offering the most nutrients for me and therefore for the development of my breast milk for my baby. Here is what I discovered.

The reason that I didn't continue to drink soy milk while I was pregnant was because I didn't want to have too much soy in my diet, as a vegetarian I eat quite a bit of soy. I compared the milk that I had been drinking to the Silk brand of soy milk, because that was the soy milk I had always drank, and this is what I found.

Silk had two thirds as many Calories and half as many calories from fat than whole milk, the kind of milk I use to drink. Half the daily value of total fat and less than one eighth of the saturated fat of whole milk. These kind of numbers would be true for a one and half percent milk of the same brand and that being said I will compare the remaining nutrition facts to that. Now a one and a half percent milk would have about a 5% or 15mg of cholesterol where Silk has none. Silk has half as many sugars and two thirds of the total carbohydrates as milk. However Silk offers 8% of the daily need intake of Potassium, something milk does not mention and 4% of the daily fiber you need where milk offers none. Silk only offers one less gram than milk of protein. Silk has the same amount of Calcium, and more Vitamin A, Vitamin D, Iron and mentions other minerals and vitamins that milk doesn't, such as Folate 6%, Magnesium 10%, Selenium 8%, Riboflavin 30%, Vitamin B12 50% and Zinc 4%. One thing that Silk has none of that milk has the 4% of the daily intake needed is Vitamin C, and Silk doesn't mention any Phosphorus but milk offers 25%.