Across the coffee shops and kitchen shelves of 2026, plant-based milks have become a quiet symbol of modern aspiration — healthier, greener, more conscientious. Yet when experts turned their scrutiny to seven of the most common claims made about these alternatives, the picture that emerged was more complicated than the marketing suggests. Nutrients do not migrate naturally from cow's milk into oat or almond drinks; they must be deliberately added back, and the word 'organic' says nothing about what a product actually contains. The deeper lesson here is an old one: the stories we tell about our