Milk Vs Peanut Milk

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

Milk is a highly nutritive and multilateral food consumed practically by everyone in different forms but mainly by children, because it is the key source of nutrition for newborns. Milk may be consumed in its natural form or used to make a broad range of milk products including cream, butter, youghurt, cheese and ice-cream (Adesola et al., 2013). Shortage of animal’s milk in various countries and the requirement for the alternatives has appreciated the development of beverages from easily available raw materials of plant origin (Elahi & Ali, 1971; Rubico et al., 1989). A large variety of milk like products can be obtained from oilseeds including groundnut, coconut, soybean and chestnuts. The growing awareness among health

There is also growing awareness of the nutritional products from plant origin proteins with low fat and low cholesterol diets among the people for better health. It has been well known that peanut milk and peanut milk products have nutritional advantages for young and old alike. Peanut milk is very healthy, because it is rich source of protein, minerals, and essential fatty acids, such as linoleic and oleic, which are acids considered to be highly valuable in human nutrition. Peanut milk supplies many nutritional benefits you won’t get from cow’s milk such as vitamin E, magnesium and vitamin B-6 and in heart-healthy unsaturated fats (Giyarto et al., 2012). There is universal scarcity of protein and peanuts can play a useful role in alleviating these shortages because of its rich content of protein (Adesola et al., 2013). The WHO recommends an average requirement of 0.66 g of protein per kg of ideal body weight and maximum level is 0.86 g/kg of body weight (Food and Nutrition Board 2002). Previous reports revealed that peanut milk and peanut milk based products can be prepared in a wide variety of ways. It is considerably used in India and most developing countries by low income families to give a low cost starch diets, underweight people, vegetarians, and more recently by children allergic to cow’s milk protein. Vegetable milk extracts can also be used as supplements in the diet for newborns who suffers from allergic conditions. Due to high level of protein peanut milk has received considerable attention in different parts of the world. In various milk products like coffee creamers (Mulando et al., 2006 ) and chocolate milk drink (Deshpande et al., 2008 ) soy and peanut milk have been