14 foods you think are dairy-free — but aren’t

With food allergies on the rise and so many people switching to plant-based diets, it’s no wonder dairy sales are down. People need—or choose—to avoid dairy for a variety of reasons, says Purvi Parikh, MD, allergist/immunologist with Allergy & Asthma Network. A true milk allergy, the body’s reaction to a protein in cow’s milk, can be life-threatening. Others have lactose intolerance, which means your body lacks an enzyme that helps you digest dairy products; this causes stomach upset and may give you diarrhea, but it’s not deadly. Still, others choose a vegan lifestyle that precludes dairy for health reasons or because they want to avoid all animal products.

How milk hides

Whatever your reason for avoiding dairy, it’s not always as simple as avoiding milk and cheese. A lot of dairy ingredients make their way into foods you’d never expect to find them in, like non-dairy creamer (really). “Reading labels is so important because these items may appear in foods you would not suspect,” says Bonnie Taub-Dix, RDN, creator of BetterThanDieting.com and author of Read It Before You Eat It: Taking You from Label to Table. In addition to scanning ingredient lists for any form of milk, cheese, or butter, she says, also keep an eye out for casein (a milk protein that can provoke allergic reactions), caseinate, lactate, lactic acid, lactalbumin, and lactylate. Ingredients are listed by weight, so the higher on the ingredients list they appear, the more of them a product contains (important for people who can tolerate small amounts of dairy). Read on for some surprising milky marauders, and find out more about decoding food labels.

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