Dairy free diet help needed

Sorry cant help you just thought i would butt in to say that its good to see you round OB a bit more now

And me! I started off just with real dairy food (cheese, milk, yoghurt etc) then ended up having to cut out everything with milk in it (chippies, biscuits etc).

Its good that you like soy milk - you can get soy yoghurt and ice-cream as well, sometimes just need to try different supermarkets. Instead of butter/marg use either olivani, golden harvest (I think its called), lite meadow lea.

Dark chocolate generally has no milk in it (not Cadbury Energy tho, that has milk) - Whittakers dark is nice. There are other brands but not from supermarket. Try and eat more brocolli and other foods high in calcium (Ca fortified soy milk etc).

And if you do find that it is helping and are planning to do it long term you may want to talk to a dietician or look at calcium supplements (with no milk in them!).

Sorry cant help much with the cheese - I just cut it out completely. Stopped craving it after a while and lost heaps of weight! I think you can get soy cheese?

Hope you can make sense of that!

There is a list of dairy free prepackaged foods on www.mfd.co.nz, just choose the milk free option.

I took Lifestream Calcim powder to boost my calcium when I was dairy free for the gremlins, and I also gave it to Maya when she was dairy free.

Some idiot told me Oreo's are dairy free so I ate them by the packet load - I wish I'd never known coz I soooooo didn't need the extra calories! Arnotts Crazy Faces are also dairy free.

Watch out for milk powder in things like flavouring on potato chips.

If you give the Nutricia dieticians a call they can send you a list of "technical terms" for milk (like caseinate, lactose etc.) that are used on labels that you might not neccessarily recognise as milk.

Yep, Maya is a big fan of the Chicken Crimpys....

ETA: Aimee, you are a legend to have been dairy-free breastfeeding for so long! It's hard work!

Edited by Maya

Hi Kellz

I am lactose intolerent (it brings on my asthma) - but for some reason I am okay with cheese. Its mainly just ice cream, milk, cream etc - ie all the good stuff!

Kingland make soy cream cheese (these are the people that make the soy yoghurts) but not all supermarkets stock it. I know that some of the Foodtowns have it. If  you are in Auckland and have problems finding it - try Harvest Wholefoods in Grey Lynn or the Foodtown in Takapuna. Its not too bad - better if you can mix it with something (i use sweet chilli sauce, or use it for cheesecake). 

Its a lot harder here than in the UK - over there you can get really yummy soy deserts (chocolate mouse style) and soy cream as well, but I guess they have the population!

I have problems with calcium, so always take a multi vitamin with added calcium (at the moment am on Elevit) but also try to eat lots of broccolli and almonds.

Good Luck!

Sam

Thanks everyone for the info. It seems being dairy free is a lot more complicated than I imagined

bump

Thats cool Kellz. Its hard work at the start isnt it, but once you get the hang of it its easy and to be honest I actually feel better for it. And its great to be able to have the positive results of no eczema etc, so you KNOW what you are doing is helping. What milk is Isla on now?

Ooh good luck for the dairy challenge. Yeah there must be something in the soy yoghurt as Han gets terrible runny poos if she has too much of it (like the 4 pottles of it over a week), yet she is fine with soy milk and ice-cream.

Hmmmm, might have to do a bit of investigation into what is actually in soy yoghurt...