Oatly: The New Coke? | Hacker News Reader

Oatly: The New Coke?

divinations.substack.com

456 pointsdshipper410 comments

I'm sympathetic to marketing counterfactuals, so I wanted to like this article, but its claims did not sway me.

- The appalling environmental footprint of the dairy industry was never addressed.

- The canola oil claims cited were nowhere near conclusive (see twanvl and NotOscarWilde's comments below).

- The nutritional comparison seemed to me to be more or less trivial.

Okay, it's got a higher glycemic index and similar sugar content compared to cow milk. If you share the author's concern about tacitly "health-adjacent" marketing, this is problematic, but not an outright lie. At worst the product has a pretty comparable nutritional portfolio to cow milk. Seems appropriate for a "milk substitute," no?

The author engages in a little deceptive rhetoric himself by setting a 12oz serving as the baseline. It's true that a portion that size is bad for you. Lattes are bad for you. Like many people, though, I only rarely use milk substitutes to add a dash of not-coffee to coffee that would otherwise be too hot or too burnt. Guess I shouldn't be concerned?

- Most glaringly, the moral dimension of dairy consumption is never addressed. I won't harp on about this too much as many other commenters have already, but this seemed like a glaring omission: who cares about sugar content if the alternative is needless suffering? I guess you could have the best of both worlds by not drinking a milk substitute in the first place, but that's not Oatly's market segment, so...

Overall, this article came away as basically validating Oatly's marketing claims to me. Which is frustrating, since as I stated above, I'm biased toward marketing scrutiny!

> The author engages in a little deceptive rhetoric himself by setting a 12oz serving as the baseline.

Yeah what is up with that? 12 oz is over 340 ml, who puts that much milk in their coffee? I had to measure the volume of my coffee cup, it's 250 ml or 8.8 oz.

I usually drink my coffee black, but if I do have milk in it it is usually a tenth of what the author uses. Unless the author is drinking a quarter gallon of coffee at a time he's not drinking coffee, but really drinking milk with a splash of coffee.

As a non-coffee drinker, I drink my oatly pure, in the same way as I drank my milk growing up. So yeah, 340 ml is apt when I use my big mug.

You make it sound as if no-one drinks pure milk in your environment? I find THAT weird.

It's absolutely fascinating to read these replies! We have a very diverse set of people here.

I had no idea that people didn't drink milk on its own. Apparently some Europeans don't. I eat cereal mostly to drink milk. If Oatly was a good substitute, I'd probably have started using it. (I haven't tried it yet.)

340ml is 0.08 gallons. That's consistent with "about a bowl of cereal."

I've seen a bunch of sides of it in the US. In the midwest where I grew up parts of my family required children to drink a glass of milk because the milk-industry propaganda at the time said it was important for kids to drink a bunch of milk for bones and growth and other stuff that was never true and was known to never be true.

But we didn't have the internet yet, so how do you fact check it? The TV said so.

I do see fewer people interested in milk as you go younger here, I think that once it was more broadly understood that milk is marginal the pressure to drink it was gone but there was still some cultural kind of urban legend nonsense that is really hard to get rid of in a society that doesn't trust experts. Which I can't blame anyone for if we're talking about nutritional experts because anyone alive for more than twenty years has seen them flip their opinion on at least a quarter of food types.

It is notable that in that part of my family, half the kids ended up lactose intolerant and still are frustrated about their parents for making them sick all the time as kids by requiring them to drink something they didn't want to drink anyway.

I liked chocolate milk because who doesn't, but after someone for the first time pointed out that it's kinda weird for humans to drink milk intended for calves (maybe I was 13 or 14?) I pretty much just stopped drinking it because it just wasn't that good anyway and now I had an excuse. My brother and mother are both lactose intolerant, it turns out.

I think a lot of people have felt low grade sick their entire lives in the US because they've never gone for long enough without dairy to notice.

Not judging, but around me, it's usually rare to drink milk after the age of 8 (my kid stopped liking milk around that time, and most of their friends too).

We do eat a lot of yogourt and cheese. The province use to over-produce milk and there was so much advertising to consume it. Everyone kind of got fed up I guess.

I've never seen an adult drink pure milk, other than in some movies. I guess it's an american thing? Any Europeans here who drink pints of milk care to comment?

You'll find most Dutch reading this topic slightly confused that people don't drink milk straight-up in the morning or during lunch. It's a staple in the majority of households here still.

Cow milk is recommended as part of the diet of young children, with government guidance noting that although calcium-enriched alternatives to cow milk (such as oat milk with added calcium) seem fine, there is as of yet insufficient data to suggest that replacing cow milk from the diet of young children won't have a negative effect. It's a fair and balanced view I suppose.

In the 70s a dairy campaign taught everyone that three pints of milk a day was healthy, but that kind of propaganda is in the past. Still, the Dutch tend to have a very positive view of our dairy industry, in part aided by animal welfare programs and certifications. That doesn't address the environmental impact of course.

I have switched to cow milk with a certified guarantee of decent treatment of the cows involved for my young son, and oat milk (Oatly usually) for us.

Austrian here. I regularly drink pure milk, sometimes a full litre at once (sometimes raw, which probably isn't a wise decision). Though I have to add that I rarely drink milk outside of my home, i.e. in public or at friends' places, or see other people doing so. I also think that most of my friends don't drink as much milk, as far as I know, and I've heard some of them say that they are lactose intolerant.

North Europe here. Myself & my kids may consume at least 1 liter of milk per day up to multiple liters (with cereal, or just drinking it or making food with it). Not counting all the milk-products we consume...

In time of poverty, cow was actually essential part of life. A life saver. You get milk, butter, sour cream, cheese, cottage cheese. I think not every word from this list makes sense to some living in some other countries, because not all products are consumed in other places in the world.

The comment you reacted to was written by me, a European (Belgium & UK). I love getting a jug of fresh milk (not the supermarket stuff though). Last winter I replaced that with Oatley, as my wife is increasingly becoming vegan. It is not the same, but now I occasionally drink it in the same way.

I lived in Finland for 5 years and it is very common there. I've seen people drinking milk at pizza place for example, like 300ml~ cups. Also at the University's cafeteria during lunch time students would drink pure milk with their meal.

Eastern European, I drink milk (though lactose free, I like it but am lactose intolerant) either by itself (cold) or with a croissant or something similar. It is pretty common here for people to drink milk by itself. I was unaware people only consumed milk with their coffee, that is strange to me.

Also, question to people who only drink milk with coffee: Do you buy small processed pouches of milk for one cup of coffee, or do you drink enough coffee to use up a 1L (~4 "cups" in US lingo) packaging of milk before it goes bad in the fridge?

German here, I drink milk almost very day. Most people I know drink some at least occasionally.

Hello from Poland. Milk is actually the item that runs out fastest in my home. I'm drinking half a cup with each coffee which I can drink more than 5 a day since I discovered decaf. Sometimes I drink pure milk when I'm little hungry and thirsty but not enough to bother with a proper meal.

We were given glass of boiled milk every day at school, and I don't remember any kid being lactose intolerant. I didn't like it back then. I prefer cold.

When I'm eating cooked buckwheat grains, glass of milk suits me best to wash it down.

French here.

We always have milk at home, my 16 and 13 yo children drink it, or eat with muesli

One of them drinks pure milk, the other much less. I do it from time to time my wife rarely to never.

Japan, in particular after a hot spring bath. In fact they will have vending machines full of single portion milk bottles for you to enjoy.

Sweden here. Pints might be an exaggeration, but definitely a staple in my fridge.

It's unusual in South-East Europe in my experience. It's far more common to eat Bulgarian yogurt instead.

I'm Canadian and I still drink it as an adult. It's good with desserts.

All the replies so far are about how nobody drinks pure milk, so...

I drink roughly a gallon a week, personally. Whole, usually.

Drank a pint a day until I was 18

I'm not grandparent but no one drinks pure milk in my environment.

I've only seen that in American movies (I'm from Europe).

I have a friend who used to drink milk as a teenager and had to stop because it caused some complication. This was 20 years ago, I don't remember the details.

It's pretty common to drink pure milk in America, if you're lactose tolerant, which the majority of the people here are. Not everyone does, of course, but it's not unusual here by any means.

I would guess they are using this comparison as oatly has become popular in coffee shops for lates etc. So the size is more common there, but probably not common at home.

In Sweden it's historically fairly normal to drink that much milk at least once day, in coffee or otherwise.

I drink about 8oz of oatly barista edition daily in my cappuccino.

I get oat milk lattes reasonably frequently.

really drinking milk with a splash of coffee

Lots of people do this. It's called a latte. Or for hipsters, a "flat white". Or any mocha-frappa-chino equivalent has a lot of milk and cream in it.

flat white and latte are 2 different drinks.

12 oz of milk though? My research says a latte contains about 6oz. Fraps probably contain less (mostly ice).

For all the talk about fat content and quality, the topic of hormones in milk should be discussed. Cows load their milk up with hormones to stimulate growth in their calves. We’re not calves and don’t need stimulating. Further, modern dairy farms pump hormones into cows to induce higher milk production-thus more hormones make it into the milk in the container. There are even morphine-like compounds in milk and dairy products. They’re even more concentrated in cheeses. These same morphine compounds can be concentrated and given from a human mother to her baby through breast milk in non-trivial doses (though the conditions hopefully make this rare). Then there’s just the negatives of having additional cholesterol through the diet.

None of that’s going to be in plant milks.

Ref “your body in balance” by Barnard.

Farmers pumping their cows full of hormones for milk production is a thing of the past, for the majority of US dairies.

Does pasteurization have any effect on the hormones? It deactivates enzymes, maybe it does the same to hormones?

> Ref “your body in balance” by Barnard

A vegan neurologist might be a bit biased...

What does he have to say about plant-based hormones such as phytoestrogens?

Also, what is wrong with a little bit of morphine in your food?

I for one always reach for a piece of cheese when I've had a stressful day, it really takes the edge off.

> A vegan neurologist might be a bit biased...

“A doctor curing cancer may be a bit biased against tobacco...”

> The author engages in a little deceptive rhetoric himself by setting a 12oz serving as the baseline. It's true that a portion that size is bad for you. Lattes are bad for you. Like many people, though, I only rarely use milk substitutes to add a dash of not-coffee to coffee that would otherwise be too hot or too burnt. Guess I shouldn't be concerned?

Maybe you shouldn't be, but others might. I was regularly using ~1 cup of Oatly (8 ounces) in my weekend pancakes. It's still only 2/3 of their baseline portion, but it's significant enough.

I've already moved from Oatly to Califia Farms Oat Barista Blend, which only has 3 grams of sugar per cup to Oatly's 7. And I'm keeping my eyes open for alternatives with even less sugar.

My current favorite is Oatly, but I've also had a half dozen others. It's worth noting that Oatly also has a barista blend, which loses some sugar in favor of fat. Likely the Califa is the same way; more oil, less sugar.

The author would say that you shouldn’t be eating pancakes, which presumably you are making with refined grains and frying in oil, and likely topping with some sort of sugar... he’s a keto fan. If you’re going to eat pancakes, I’d say it’s worth making them taste good.

I make my pancakes with oat flour, no sugar (other than the chocolate chips--can't give those up), and no dairy. The chips are at least 62% cocoa, so their sugar levels aren't as high as milk chocolate chips. I just checked and the oat flour I use (Bob's Red Mill) is whole grain, not refined. So I think I'm doing alright!

By no means are these pancakes healthy, but after years of experiments I think I managed to find something that just straddles the barrier between nutritional-waste and nutritional sabotage. And that's fine for one meal a week. Thanks for your concern, though!

Keto has some awesome pancakes though, honestly at this point my favorite pancakes are all keto recipes.

Almond hazelnut pancakes are /good/.

Keto has come a long ways since the days of steak and eggs for every meal.

There’s also Elmhurst - though more expensive. It’s basically just water and oats and maybe some salt. They list the number of ingredients on the label though for easy selection as some have more.

I've been making my own oat milk on occasion. I just got some 80 micron nut milk bags (at least two, I double strain) and use the recipe found here: https://minimalistbaker.com/make-oat-milk/

The hardest part is figuring out just how long you need to blend it for. It took me three batches to get it just right. The first was too thin (didn't blend long enough), the second too slimy (blended too long).

It's dirt cheap and gets the job done. Give it a good shake before you use it, though, as it has a tendency to settle.

This is fantastic and I'll be giving a try. Do you think the recipe/process works fine if I scale it down to a 1-cup yield?

If it settles, do you get a consistent texture when drinking it? Ever tried to foam it for a latte?

Thanks! I'll definitely keep an eye out for it.

Now if only they can make a 16oz product for those us of who don't use it enough to consume 32oz in 7-10 days...

According to the article, the maltose in Oatly is a product of the breakdown of the oats. Would it be listed as an ingredient?

It is not listed. I found out by googling around after noticing that there was added sugar listed in the nutrition facts but no sugar of any kind listed in the ingredients.

False.

> At worst the product has a pretty comparable nutritional portfolio to cow milk

FTA: "Of all the different kinds of sugars you can eat, maltose has the highest glycemic index, with a rating of 105 out of 100.

"Lactose, the sugar in cow’s milk, has a GI of 46."

It is incorrect to call 105 and 46 "comparable".

"High GI == bad" also seems like an oversimplification. A snicker's bar has a GI of 43: http://www.glycemicindex.com/foodSearch.php?num=1774&ak=deta....

The article was about the marketing methods, comparing them to Coke from before. It wasn't about oats vs milk, per se

Picking a nit: “Lattes are bad for you” come now. No food is inherently “bad”. In moderation or in a balanced diet you can regularly eat some amount of “bad” food and remain perfectly healthy. I do agree they aren’t a health food but I dislike “good” and “bad”. I think healthier and unhealthier is a much better axis for food, and making choices around food.

You have it backwards. No food is inherently “good” for you. Most people are better off skipping meals until they absolutely need nutrients. There’s toxins in all food.

Another note: there is no such thing as “toxins” in food. Barring things like heavy metals, and actual poison. You won’t see any research about nutrition and food talk about “toxins” in a context like this.

There's toxins in all air, but we don't hold our breath until we need to breathe...

I mean we kind of do. If everyone breathed like they ate(in the US) there would be people fainting all over the place.

False. Lattes ARE most definitely bad for you when they contain 30-40 grams of sugar or almost 3 TABLESPOONS.[1]

[1] https://www.starbucks.com/menu/product/414/hot?parent=%2Fdri...

You picked a dessert drink.

An actual Latte has less than half the number of carbs as that https://www.starbucks.com/menu/product/407/hot?parent=%2Fdri...

You can also get it with almond milk reduce it by another 1/3

Lattes aren't defined by that specific recipe served at Starbucks.

Surely they are. They are one possible example.

That drink is a latte, but a latte isn't that drink. A latte is made with two ingredients: espresso and milk. Anything else is a variation.

I prefer unsweetened lattes. For some reason sweet just clashes with the mouthfeel and flavor to me.

The claim is that Oatly is not a good substitute for milk, and that cow milk is perfectly fine to drink for a good percentage of people, which I judge the article demonstrated satisfactorily.

You can of course say you don't want to (or can't) drink milk for a very long list of absolutely fine reasons. The solution then is to just not drink milk, not substitute it with oat-canola slurry. Or you could reduce your consumption to the point where its price can go up (as more of a luxury product) and allow manufacturers to treat animals ethically. Or buy it from responsible farms.

You can also make the point here that there is a great number of people who, when faced with the choice of "drink less milk" vs "continue cow abuse", will pick the latter because they like drinking milk more than they care about cows (which are bred specifically for human consumption). In that case you could argue that substituting Oatly for milk will make the world better, because it lets them lower their milk consumption without requiring sacrifice on their part. The thing that worries me here are second order effects - if Oatly is indeed not very healthy (which it sounds like it isn't, at least compared to regular milk), then these people will then suffer lowered cognition and worse health, leading to them making less than ideal choices in democratic elections, and putting more strain on the health system.

Again - there are good critiques that can be leveraged against our current farming practices regarding milk production and more, but I don't see the solution being switching to synthetic alternatives with potentially harmful effects that marketing makes their best to prevent you from knowing. Just go without and advocate for change.

> cow milk is perfectly fine to drink for a good percentage of people

There's no debating that milk is heavy to digest, more so than water infused with whatever you want (tea, rice, soy, oat, almond...), whatever your ancestry. You actually need some enzyme to cut it down so that you can metabolize it. This process doesn't exist for infused water.

> The solution then is to just not drink milk, not substitute it with oat-canola slurry.

No, you can buy very fine "vegetable milks", just not oatly. I don't have any experience in US but in every west-european supermarket you can find heaps of them in the organic section. And if you wanna argue about the price: just make it yourself, it's dirt-cheap, just buy bulk cereals/beans (oat, soy, rice, chickpea ... be creative it works with mostly anything), boil it in water, mix it and drain it. Ta-Da, you just got pure vegetable milk for pennies and as bonus heaps of dry draining residue you can use as wheat replacement in cakes or croquettes (or used as semolina).

This, absolutely. Making milk from almonds is silly easy and dirt cheap. Soak 1 cup of almonds overnight, drain, add 3:1 ratio of water to almond nuts. Blend. Strain. Done. Optionally make ricciarelli cookies from the almonds left behind :)

At least where I'm from in the US, there is no "bulk goods aisle" in the grocery. It makes it a hell of a lot harder to eat healthy because we have no alternatives to canned and packaged goods in many categories of foods.

The article completely hand waves cows milk as fine while references weak studies for damages of oatly.

Oatly or cows milk can be part of a perfectly healthy diet provided use in moderation. If you’re having 3, 12+oz lattes maybe you should consider not doing that.

There are other brands with no canola, or any oil added.

My favourite in the uk is "innocent".

But I think if you're going to get wound up about canola oil, there are bigger targets than milk substitutes.

"Made for humans" also draws attention to the fact that the milk you're drinking from a cow is not being drank by the offspring of that cow like it normally would and many people don't realise you have to keep making diary cows give birth to get more milk. Newly born male cows are usually turned into veal in a few weeks and female cows are separated from their mothers so they don't drink the valuable milk. Milk giving cows are then slaughtered for meat when they stop yielding enough milk after several births.

This reality isn't obvious from milk ads. I'll admit I only learned the above in the last few years because nobody talks about it and when you try people will instinctively defend these uncomfortable facts.

That probably should be taught at school. That's the way farms work. Animals are slaughtered so you can eat them.

The reason I think it should be taught at school is first because it basic knowledge. Farms employ a significant portion of the population of most countries, and that's what puts food on the table and keeps you alive. That's pretty important.

Another reason is that school can teach that with a neutral point of view. Not like extremists who will describe any farm work involving animals as torture, and not like the interested food industry who wants you to forget that yes, animals are slaughtered to feed you.

Personally, as a meat eater, I think that realizing that an animal died for your food helps respecting it. By that I mean don't waste it, cook it properly, appreciate the taste, and of course, prefer respectful farming practices as much as you can.

I learned all of this in school in a country where agriculture was a significant segment of the economy. It was most definitely not taught with a "neutral point of view".

Now that I have learned to understand the world with a more informed and nuanced perspective than the one my public education provided me with, I would certainly agree much more with the "extremists" you mention than any meat-eater justifications of how it "keeps you alive" or "respecting" the animals by eating them. And I say this as someone who still consumes meat and other animal products.

It takes quite a lot of doublethink to mention respect and eating animals in the same sentence. And I say this as a meat eater as well (although I heavily reduced consumption of animal products in the last few months).

The thing is that you have to kill to eat. Doesn't really matter what do you eat - something has to die for you to live. When you realize that, it's much easier to treat not only cows but everything around you with respect. We've got this respect long time ago and we've forgot about it all after agricultural revolution. Kind of sad...

We don't need to kill cows to live though so in what way is it respectful treatment to kill something to eat when you don't need to?

Could you explain what you mean without using the word "respect" so I can understand your definition of it?

I hosted a meetup on “dairy tech”. Before the presentation, I think I had an implicit assumption that cattle raised for beef were treated poorly. I came away realizing that cattle used for milk production suffer more. In the most efficient dairies, they never leave their enclosure, are kept pregnant continuously via artificial insemination, and are injected with hormones.

> I came away realizing that cattle used for milk production suffer more.

I think you could certainly argue that. Beef cows are slaughtered at around 3 years and diary cows are slaughtered at around 5 years but after giving birth with their offspring taken away several times (both have about a 20 year life span).

Personally, I don't understand how vegetarians justify it as being much different in terms of animal cruelty. You're still paying into a system that's killing animals for your benefit.

> Personally, I don't understand how vegetarians justify it as being much different in terms of animal cruelty. You're still paying into a system that's killing animals for your benefit.

I've been vegan for years and I wish people wouldn't take this position publicly.

I agree with you, but it's more effective to have lots of people consuming fewer animal products than a few people cutting out animal products "100%". (Of course it's never 100%, that'd be impossible unless you left society.)

Let's be optimistic about the amount of change that normal people can do instead of chastising allies for not doing enough.

You get around 500 pounds of meat from a full grown cow. So, based on average US consumption that’s ~1 cow per 9 years per person. A single dairy cow produces ~100,000 lbs of milk over their lifespan. At average US consumption that’s ~1 cow per 200 years per person.

US waste and exports make it hard to sanity check these numbers, but in 2018 there where 31.4 Million beef cows in US vs 9.4 milk cows adjusting for longer lifespan that’s possibly a 5.5:1 ratio.

Out of curiosity, do you have a source for these numbers? It's interesting to hear that one dairy cow's lifespan effectively covers enough milk for two average human lifespans worth of consumption.

> You're still paying into a system that's killing animals for your benefit

Still a net improvement over buying milk and meat isn't it?

Also, people are vegetarian for all sorts of reasons. For some it's about eating meat, for some it's about animal cruelty, for some it's about environmental impact, and probably there's plenty of other reasons

I think it's quite simple: many vegetarians have no idea of the conditions in an average dairy farm. I was vegetarian for a number of years before I went vegan. I had assumed dairy cows had it reasonably good and it was quite a shock to find out how horrible their treatment teens to be.

My understanding is that it's significantly easier to eat a healthy vegetarian diet than a healthy vegan diet. Therefore, it seems to me that vegetarianism is a reasonable compromise.

Because they like milk. You can justify anything if you want it to be true.

Where does this end? Industrial farming kills insects. We obviously don't have the same amount of love for insects as we have for cows. But why should cows live and insects die?

This comes back to killing humans, one way or the other. How many insects are a foetus? Are poor people not allowed to have children so that insects can keep on living?

We should figure out how to grow only the milk production parts.

I hope you realize that according to your description, there are very few of those "most efficient" dairies. For best milk production, the cows need to be kept happy and healthy. That means letting them have a place to go out of their barn, walk around, lay in the sun, etc. Also pumping them full of hormones is a thing of the past. Source: lived on a dairy farm all my life

I’m ideologically positive to vegetarianism and veganism but I’m so sick of this argument. Something being “made for humans” is in no way a positive — so is cocaine.

Look, if the marketing for oatly just focused entirely and explicitly on the cruelty of the dairy industry that they are competing against, they would never be a successful alternative to dairy because most consumers don’t respond positively to being exposed to graphic, disturbing, and negative information about competitors on product packaging. If anything it makes consumers want to look away, reach for humor to trivialize the issues, or rationalize away any role they choose to play in the cruelty. “Made for humans” here really doesn’t mean anything other than “not being taken from calves” except phrased in a more positive way. This isn’t about “natural” versus “artificial” as it is about making choices which are less ethically fraught, but vegans are hated by the large majority of the rest of us because we don’t care for others explicitly or implicitly condemning us for our lack of ethical integrity when we choose convenience and comfort over doing less harm.

> vegans are hated by the large majority of the rest of us

This a very weird claim. I know some fringe groups like ridiculing vegans, but I find it very hard to believe that a majority of people would have a negative view towards veganism.

>the cruelty of the dairy industry that they are competing against

I have first-hand knowledge of "the dairy industry". I don't see cruelty. Can you fill me on what's cruel about it?

Cruelty is subjective, so I'll play the vegan's advocate here since I'm not vegan myself: Dairy cows are forcibly inseminated and then used for their milk way beyond the time period they normally would produce milk. In many parts of the world they are kept in conditions which are cruel, and they may also suffer physically from this treatment (infections etc). In essence, dairy animals are treated like machines rather than animals and very little concern is given to their well being rather than their profitability. Morality is, as always, subjective, but from a vegan perspective, this is unnecessary and cruel exploitation.

I'd also like to add that most vegans are not magically averse to meat or dairy as a product: they are mostly concerned with the industrial complex of producing animal products. I think most vegans would have no, or at least a lot less, problems with dairy production if it happened in a way where cows were treated very well and did not suffer in any way from having their milk taken (which would make milk prohibitively expensive, I assume).

> Something being “made for humans” is in no way a positive — so is cocaine.

It's more of a spin from the phase "milk is for baby cows" though (not sure what the equivalent would be for cocaine). I used to roll my eyes at this as a naturalistic fallacy but point the being made here is:

1) cows do not give milk unless they've been pregnant

2) the newly born calves need to be separated from their mothers so there's more milk sell

There's no similar ethical difficult with oats.

It's a pretty ridiculous simplification of how nature works. Animals being dependent on each-other is found everywhere in nature, and the fact is that cows at this point would stand almost no chance in nature since we have bred them to the point of cuddly teddy bears. So you could argue that cows get protection and we get milk, it's not necessarily exploitation in my mind until you get to the point where you talk about industrial production of meat and dairy, which to be honest is pretty cruel and horrifying in parts.

> Animals being dependent on each-other is found everywhere in nature

Human ethics clearly shouldn't and aren't based on what other animals do to each other though.

> the fact is that cows at this point would stand almost no chance in nature since we have bred them to the point of cuddly teddy bears

You could justify anything with this argument: "doing X to Y is bad, but we've specifically bred Y to have X done to them such that Y can't survive in the wild anymore, therefore it's okay to do X".

Just stop breeding them. There's related species in the wild that will live on.

I really don't have a problem with these things. I don't have a problem killing animals for food, even baby cows. I also don't have a problem killing animals that can't be properly cared for (hello PETA).

What I _do_ care about is how those animals are treated before they are killed. I am aware of the process for keeping dairy cows productive. I also am uncertain if the separation of calves and cows causes distress. I find it just as likely that assuming so is to anthropomorphize them. However, the reason I don't know the answer to that is because the treatment of farm animals in factory farms is far more concerning to me.

The biggest disconnect between vegans and non-vegans seems to be the assertion that animals can't be raised ethically for food. Instead of focusing on areas of commonality between each other, a distaste for the unnecessary suffering of animals, each party focuses on the disagreements and can't get anything done together.

Also, as an aside, the process you describe makes the cow's milk "made for humans" as much as anything is. Humans manipulate the cow's biology to produce milk for humans.

> I also am uncertain if the separation of calves and cows causes distress.

There's plenty of YouTube videos of how cows react to this. Most animals instinctively protect their offspring, and cows are social animals on top of this.

I believe that some dairies use "sexed" semen to minimise the ratio of male calves. Doesn't detract from the separation, etc though.

I didn't believe you, but:

> The method works by staining sperm with a DNA-binding fluorescent dye. The bovine Y-chromosome-bearing sperm contain 3.8% less DNA than the X-chromosome-bearing sperm. Because of the dye, the male and female sperm can be electrically charged differently. This allows for their separation by a fluorescence-activated cell sorter (Seidel, 2007). The method is fairly accurate with ~90% of the sperm containing the desired sex (Garner and Seidel, 2003; DeJarnette et al., 2008). Sexed semen will contain a lower concentration of sperm per straw (approximately 2 million) than non-sexed semen (approximately 20 million) because the sorting process is relatively slow. Because of lower doses of sperm per straw, and possibly a negative effect of the sorting process, fertility of sexed sperm is typically lower compared with conventional sperm (Garner and Seidel, 2003; DeJarnette et al., 2008).[1]

1. https://dairy-cattle.extension.org/the-economics-of-sexed-se....

I did some work filming dairies late last year and it was mentioned in the interviews.

The biggest "industrial" dairy we visited had most of the cows under cover in large, open-sided sheds. The sheds were ventilated and the cows had fresh bedding regularly, and I'm confident this wasn't put on for us given we were a tiny camera crew. I expected it to be completely miserable but the areas the cows lay to ruminate was clean and they all looked very content. The cows in this operation were much, much cleaner than those at traditional, smaller dairies we visited (who got absolutely filthy with each other's waste, lying out in fields to ruminate). I imagine it's like being given food and allowed to sit on the couch watching TV all day, which is what half of us do already.

Not sure if they have a solution for the separation and permanent pregnancy issues.

I wonder if veal farmers are using the exact same technology to increase the ratio of male calves

How do dairy farmers do it in India (where milk is a huge thing, while beef, while also actually a large industry, is much more controversial)?

A cow does lactate for around 10 months before it would need to have a calf again. Also, a cow produces faaar more milk then one calf needs. Source: live on a dairy, grew up feeding calves. Used milk replacer for a while but then switched to plain milk cause it's healthier for the calves (no surprise)

“Made for humans” has nothing to do with human nutrition, it’s about making humans rich selling a low content, high profit product.

The ads and PR about the various sugary cloudy white water drinks always de-empathize the sugar delivery, and the marketing always subtly supports the ignorant faux ethical arguments around dairy pushed with religious zeal by certain groups.

> the marketing always subtly supports the ignorant faux ethical arguments around dairy

What faux ethical arguments are those? Oat milk is less resource intensive and reduces animal cruelty - those are compelling ethical arguments to me.

I drink milk, but I think the strongest case against drinking cows milk is industrial-scale dairy farming. We (consumers) are to blame because we want milk as cheap as possible.

We've seen protests across Europe in the past by farmers who say they can't provide milk at such cheap prices and maintain welfare standards. Unfortunately, we consumers seem unwilling to pay for high welfare. Sure we say otherwise when asked, but our actions at the supermarket tell a different story.

Also, most consumers don't even know what conditions are like for dairy animals. In Europe, consumers smugly assume we have high welfare standards (maybe we do relative to other countries), but I was shocked to learned that some farms still tie and tether cows in small cramped indoor spaces [1]. In fact, most dairy cows will spend the majority of their life indoors rather than outside grazing on pasture. This is the price of cheap, industrial-scale agriculture.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/dec/08/its-medi...

> We (consumers) are to blame because we want milk as cheap as possible.

So, you're not going to blame Lactalis are you ?

It's so easy for a seller to escape from any responsibility "we're just selling what consumers want !". This is fallacious because consumers buy whatever product available for sale that is closest to what they want.

Consumers don't decide how industry invests to make their product. I mean, I buy milk, cream, cheese, from a local farm, I have my own chicken and so on, but that's because I can, but I wouldn't feel like blaming people who don't and claim of having better morality or whatnot.

Just to point out how things are all connected ... the relatively affluent on up to the obscenely rich can afford to pay for "high welfare" animal food production.

If minimum wage and/or the fraction of GDP that ended up in the pockets of employees had stayed in line with (say) mid-1970s levels, I would imagine that most people could (at least choose to) afford "high welfare" animal food production.

> We (consumers) are to blame

No, the farmers are to blame. This is the kind of thing regulations solve. If we force the use of sustainable and ethical farming methods through regulation, like how we force producers to obey all other aspects of food safety and production, then the market will adjust to the new prices, whatever they may be.

Actually I think the fault mostly lies with discounters leveraging the fuck out of farmers to compete against other discounters. There's a EU directive being implemented currently that would prohibit discounters from selling below cost, and it's very necessary.

I would say the fault is with EU and its subsidies: https://m.dw.com/en/are-subsidies-driving-dairy-farmers-into...

Agriculture is a surprisingly difficult market. Part of that is an understandable desire of governments to maintain local production. Nobody wants to risk being cut-off their food supply.

The only way to make cattle farming sustainable is by doing far far less of it. Governments need to impose massive taxes on dairy and beef products in order to severely reduce their consumption. But they do the opposite and subsidise it instead, often to the point that we are throwing out viable animal products because there is too much of it.

A tangent on Canola and rapeseed oil:

I have recently watched a Chinese Cooking Demystified video (I believe it was [1]) about the Chinese rapeseed oil and its comparison in taste and erucic acid contents to Canola oil, which is its only available variant in Western countries.

The video stated a thesis echoed on Wikipedia's page on Erucic acid [2]:

> Studies done on laboratory animals in the early 1970s show that erucic acid appears to have toxic effects on the heart at high enough doses. However, more recent research has cast doubt on the relevance of rat studies to the human health of erucic acid. Rats are unusual in their inability to process erucic acid, and the symptoms in rats caused by a diet with high levels of erucic acid has not been observed in pigs, primates, or any other animals.

From what I understand, all the references in the Oatly article focus on Canola oil, which is supposed to be low on erucic acid. However, the few (~3) research sources in the Oatly article that I clicked on all do rat/mouse studies. Isn't that kind of strange, considering the erucic acid rat research controversy?

The Wikipedia page on Canola oil [3] does not mention the health risks aside from the erucic acid controversy. Still, since Canola oil is such an important product, I can imagine any negative studies or claims could be contested. (Disclaimer: I have not checked the edit history of that page myself.)

To sum up, I currently have no idea if Canola oil or rapeseed oils in general are risky, healthy in reasonable doses, or something else completely. If anyone with any expertise comes around, please educate me.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDP9t65PVsY

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erucic_acid

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canola_oil

Whoa! I wrote the text you quoted from Wikipedia [1]. I learned about mustard oil [2] from a couple of Indian recipes and was surprised that it's one of the primary oils used in India while being banned for human consumption in the US (leading to the development of canola oil). Trying to resolve this dissonance led to an evening of research which I then contributed to wikipedia. It's neat to see the research loop closed, actually having an impact when other people read the stuff.

I'm reminded of when I checked a dissertation out of the university library once; it had only been checked out once before. The librarian at the checkout counter looked up at me with a grin and said, "I wrote that!"

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Erucic_acid&diff=... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mustard_oil&diff=...

Good shout on the studies maybe not being obviously relevant.

I checked them, and the score is: Rat, Rat, actually about cooking in canola oil, any vegetable oil versus less olive oil, Rat, actually about a different oil with quite different content of the active acid being trialled, Rat, Rat.

After this review, it is clear to me they cheated with what could have been the most quantitative part of the argument: a bad sign indeed. And yeah, turns out this is written by SEO marketer.

Sorry I don't get what you're saying. "Rat"?

Think 'rat' indicates a study the OP found that was performed on rats

This comment is the long form equivalent of the excellent https://mobile.twitter.com/justsaysinmice (and just as great, thanks)

There's also mustard oil, which is banned for human consumption in the US due to fears about erucic acid.

Mustard oil is one of the most common cooking oils in India and Pakistan. As a result, all mustard oil in the US is labeled "for external use only". People still use it for cooking.

> There's also mustard oil, which is banned for human consumption in the US due to fears about erucic acid.

Fun snippet from the wikipedia page on Mustard Oil: "Rats are unusual in their inability to process erucic acid, and the symptoms in rats caused by a diet with high levels of erucic acid has not been observed in pigs, primates, or any other animals"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mustard_oil

> As a result, all mustard oil in the US is labeled "for external use only"

Huh, same in the UK too - I wondered why on earth it would say that on a bottle of mustard oil, now I know!

What health risks do you imagine might exist?

We can break down the composition of it very precisely and have lots of information about each molecule present in it. It's not some big mystery.

And it's not invalidating for a safety study to be rat based if the rats are more sensitive to the molecule than humans...

But it may invalidate it if rats are unique among mammals in suffering any harm at all.

That doesn't really invalidate a 'safe' result.

(it's not a particularly useful result at that point, I agree)

Great write up on debunking oatly's "health benefits". But fails to mention the the moral reasons to choose oat milk over cow's milk.

TBF lot of the meat replacements are plagued by similar problems. [1]

[1] https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/impossible-and-beyond-ho...

Exactly what I had in mind.

The article does not mention cow milk's health implications, and only focuses on debunking Oatly's alleged health benefits. This creates the same "Obscure the Truth" effect the article opens with, giving the impression that there's nothing wrong with cow milk.

If both options are equally unhealthy (which is at the minimum the biased impression the article gives by not discussing cow milk), at the minimum the moral one should be chosen.

Yeah, and one shouldn't ignore the economic and environmental drawbacks of milk – in the US, at least, the government subsidises milk production heavily so it's profitable for the farmers. And dairy milk is terrible for the environment: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46654042

What actual proven health implications does cows milk have?

> The article does not mention cow milk's health implications, and only focuses on debunking Oatly's alleged health benefits

The article links to an entire other article discussing cow milk's health implications.

> If both options are equally unhealthy (which is at the minimum the biased impression the article gives by not discussing cow milk), at the minimum the moral one should be chosen.

Cow's milk and oat milk aren't the only two alternatives, though. Milk substitutes abound, some of them having much better health and moral implications (and as discussed in this thread, milk substitutes can be made at home).

The article is about the failings of Oatly, not the failures of milk.

There’s lots of milk substitutes that aren’t as bad for you as Oatly.

I read the comparison to milk as just a comparison to the baseline or what Oatly wants to taste like, not as an endorsement of cow milk.

Which milk substitutes are better? Especially in the sense that they wouldn't be able to accrue complaints from an assailant as dogged as this writer.

> But fails to mention the the moral reasons to choose oat milk over cow's milk.

This is kind a red herring. Cow's milk should be irrelevant because you don't have to choose between the two. You can leave both out if you have moral reasons to avoid cow's milk and health reasons to avoid oat milk.

The author compares them to each other, so it makes sense to talk about why you should take it out of the picture.

As it happens, though, unsweetened almond milk does seem to have much less sugar – 0.2g by one measure I found (another just says 2g carbs of which 1g is fiber) and a glycemic index of 25 (low).

So it is a bit surprising that the author didn't make this comparison – it's much more favorable to his point.

Moral and environmental. Milk is one level up from eating vegetables. Some milk consumption is probably sustainable, but we can't feed the entire world on quark cheese.

We can feed the entire world on bugs. Are you prepared to eat bugs on a daily basis? I possibly would, occasionally, but maybe I'd like them cooked with a bit of butter, which is made out of cows milk.

Is Glycemic Index important for healthy people or is it mainly of concern to people with diabetes?

The NHS suggests the latter, but it doesn't seem to have a very strong position - unlike the article, which seems very sure that high GI is bad for you.

However, using the glycaemic index to decide whether foods or combinations of foods are healthy can be misleading.

https://www.nhs.uk/common-health-questions/food-and-diet/wha...

Glycemic index is a somewhat deceptive measurement. A snickers bar has a lower glycemic index than a slice of whole wheat bread[0][1]. That doesn't make it better for you.

What glycemic index is actually showing you is the ratio of fat to carbs. And carbs are not inherently unhealthy. As a distance runner, I consume a lot more carbs than the average person, and I'm in the best shape of my life.

[0] https://www.dietandfitnesstoday.com/glycemicIndexDetails.php...

[1] http://www.dietandfitnesstoday.com/glycemicIndexDetails.php?...

I think it's only really relevant if you have diabetes or other disorders that affect blood glucose (e.g. reactive hypoglycemia), as long as people know that in general sugars (and potatoes!) will cause spikes in blood sugar, and so should be consumed in moderation.

Although, even if you do have diabetes or the like, IMO just using the number of grams of carbohydrate and sugar in something is usually enough information, as you know that, in general, carbohydrates will cause your blood sugar to rise, and sugars will cause it to rise rapidly.

I have reactive hypoglycemia, and knowing the GI of a few foods is useful, only because you wouldn't think they were that bad (potatoes!) - but after learning it, just the macros are enough make a decision.

> The evidence for the harms of canola oil is still in its early days, but continues to grow. Research has linked it to: Memory impairment [1], Alzheimer’s risk [1], Cardiovascular disease [2], [5], [6], [8], Diabetes [2], Increased all-cause mortality [2], [6], [7], Metabolic syndrome [3], Decreased brain function [4], and Oxidative stress [5], [7].

Most of these references talk about how there is no clear benefit of vegetable oils over animal oils or how "chronic canola oil consumption" results in obesity in transgenic mice. That is not really the same thing as "growing evidence for the harms of canola oil".

For completeness, I checked them all and the score is:

* Rat

* actually about cooking _in_ canola oil

* about switching _any_ vegetable oil to _less_ olive oil

* Rat

* actually about a different oil with quite different content of the active acid being trialled

* Rat

(Oh, and the article is written by a SEO marketer)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24090817 points out that rats, rather uniquely, cannot process erucic acid (part of canola oil) and the rat studies likely do not apply to most other mammals (including humans).

At this point, we should all just flag this article til it's gone. It's FUD

I'm curious of your actual hunch, are you actually skeptical that canola (and other industrial seed oils) are not harmful?), or just pointing something out about the evidence?

I read it as twanvl pointing out that there is a lack of evidence to support the article's claims.

I would be interested to know if these studies refer to low quality vegetable oils using a chemical process to extract oil. For example, in the UK, supermarkets sell cold-pressed rapeseed oil (canola oil in the US). The cold-press process is sold as making rapeseed oil as relatively healthy cooking oil.

Does cold-pressing rapeseed/canola seed turn it into a relatively healthy cooking oil (vs the expeller-pressed or chemical extraction process)?

The problem is the fats in those oils are very susceptible to oxidation and have low smoke points, they are never safe as cooking oils for this reason.

For cooking the best options outside of animal fats are olive oil and coconut oil, but of course olive oil is most versatile and better tasting imo.

> obesity in transgenic mice.

I definitely read this as "obesity in transgender mice" the first couple times and was seriously wondering if that was actually a thing.

When I used to go to Japan, they had some kind of artificial creamer that was awesome. I actually preferred it to milk. I used to look forward to guzzling cup after cup of coffee in the hotel breakfast restaurant.

It was probably 100% artificial, but it was great. I normally can't stand non-dairy creamers, of any kind, in the US.

They seem to have an industry that makes artificial food, and it's quite advanced.

I remember these artificial strawberries that were made of something like white chocolate. They were better than the "real thing."

I'm probably gonna drop dead, because I consumed these things, but I did like them.

The author should write a similar article about himself, because the whole article is filled with dubious claims and misguided evidence. The two main claims are "Since the GI is a measure of how much of a negative response your body has to certain sugars" and "research showing harms from canola oil". Neither can be ascertained. A big problem with nutritional science is that it's complex, therefore it is neigh impossible to discover the truth how specific foods really impact the body. I'm also of the opinion that the term "healthy" shouldn't be really used. Here I go with Paracelsus: "All things are poison, and nothing is without poison; the dosage alone makes it so a thing is not a poison." The author invites us to his newsletter "on getting healthy, wealthy, and wise." Yeah, it's all a baseless marketing ploy by, and for, the author.

I want to note, I'm making no argument that Oatly should be considered healthy though.

i agree wholeheartedly with the spirit of your comment, but saying "nutritional science is complex" or "the dosage alone makes it so that a thing is not a poison" does not help people figure out what foods to choose or how much to consume.

looking at the glycemic index is a useful heuristic and some of the research on canola oil makes me skeptical of it, and i think it is good for the author to point that out, as it suggests that oat milk might not be as safe as it is marketed to be.

another heuristic is biasing in favor of food that is processed less eg eating a bowl of oats is probably a better idea than drinking the analogous amount of oatly. similarly, it is a good idea to eat foods that people like you have been eating for long times, which in the oats vs oatly example favors the oats.

the precautionary principle suggests that the onus is to verify the safety of a given new food, not to prove that it is unsafe.

The one thing I'd change there is to delete the word "new" from the last sentence.

There are all sorts of foods that are terrible from a health perspective, but get grandfathered into a culture because they became popular before science really caught on. If you're closely analyzing the biochemistry of oatly or soy milk or whatever, and finger-wagging at others for drinking them, but still drink beer on a regular basis, you may be engaging in premature optimization.

Or, just looking at sugars: A serving of Oatly does contain 7g of sugar. The same amount of whole milk contains 13. You don't notice it because lactose tastes less sweet than many other sugars, but it's still a pretty generous dose of calories in the form of simple carbohydrates. I can't personally make the glycemic index comparison, because, while I can guess, I have no actual idea what the glycemic index of two tablespoons of lactose would be. Or even if measuring that would tell you anything about the glycemic index of a complex foodstuff that happens to contain that much lactose. I suspect you can't actually directly infer the one from the other, so, unlike the author of TFA, I think I might choose to proceed with caution there.

As far as what to consume: The messaging out there is remarkably consistent, as long as you tune out any information that's being provided by people who are trying to sell you something. Be it an actual foodstuff, a book, fitness lessons, or even just advertising. Even Michael Pollan nailed it pretty early in his career. In a single sentence, too. It's just that then he had to keep going, because stopping there wouldn't have made for much of a career as an author.

> There are all sorts of foods that are terrible from a health perspective, but get grandfathered into a culture because they became popular before science really caught on.

Yes and no. There is some element of an inherent scientific method involved in having cultures eat various foods for tens of thousands of years and then seeing which ones are still around at the end of the “experiment”

Not to mention Glycemic Index of foods is misleading. If you have a lot of fiber in your gut it slows down the digestion of everything. GI can’t be used in isolation. It’s useful to know, but Oatly also has a lot of fiber in it. I am less keen on the Canola oil though.

No only that, its only relevant if you have diabetes/pre-diabetic markers. If you're not then it's as relevant to you as being concerned about lactose if you're not lactose intolerant.

It’s relevant, but also easy to measure. GI is a guess at what the product will do to your blood sugar. A diet high in fiber they included oatly with a meal is going to give a very different insulin response than oatly in isolation which will likely be different again when compared to pure maltose. I am not diabetic and had fun measuring my blood sugar for a while. Full meals with a lot of fiber, even if they included high GI foods didn’t do a lot to my blood sugar compared to high GI foods in isolation. So, as a diabetic, you just have to know how your body handles some foods and how best to consume them (or not).

It's true that if you eat fat, protein and fibre alongside sugars, the effective GI of the sugars is reduced.

But I really don't think see how that makes measurements of individual foods misleading. How is it any different than individual foods being labelled with calorie counts and macro-nutrient figures?

Edit: I think the article uses the high GI of a sugar ingredient to claim that Oatly is bad - yes, this is misleading; the GI of the whole product is what matters.

I suspect the article is mostly about getting seo juice for the newsletter so it boosts his clients more when he links to them.

Though I’m not in seo myself, so I don’t know how these things work really.

That's the main problem I face with studies with Food/Dieting etc etc.

You can equally claims both sides and reject both studies. Nobody know anything for sure and you can prove equally wrong/right both sides.

Eg: Cow milk is bad while whole generations have drank them.

TFA cites eight peer reviewed articles to support his claims about the harms of canola oil. "We can't know anything" is an easier argument to make than taking an affirmative position one way or another, but it isn't insightful or interesting.

Edit: Others in this thread have made more substantive arguments about flaws with the research cited.

Was the main problem the glucose spike? Could a person just test it out by measuring their blood glucose levels?

Though this is my anecdotal experience, I've had an interesting journey related to food sensitivities and realizing how much certain foods actually caused physical pain when eating them once I had removed them and allowed my body to become de-conditioned to that level of pain/stress; conditioning is the action of not noticing, eliminating it from your awareness, however from my experience that shows that that doesn't mean something you don't notice isn't harming you or causing you problem. I had done an Igg food sensitivity test (inflammatory marker diagnostic; just a few drops of blood on a card that would get sent in) to test for ~200 foods. I removed the foods that showed up and I felt better. Weeks later multiple times with different foods I would eat one of the foods on the list and I was amazed at how clearly I could feel, experience the physical pain - some severe - that I would experience from now eating it.

This brings me to another point I wanted to make. You said the term "healthy" shouldn't be used, I'd posit that a caveat is necessary to avoid generalization - generalization which is the actual culprit: "may not be healthy for you specifically." It's very naive to ignore that though most of us have a head, two arms, two legs, etc. that our inner workings aren't complex and diverse - including our sensitivity level and tolerances for different types of stressors. We can know however inflammation in the body can lead to Alzheimers-Dementia, and that sugars carbohydrates, and certain other foods like dairy are highly inflammatory (for everyone) - whether that causes enough dysfunction for you to eliminate them from your diet or not is one question. Another question is perhaps a person is using these foods to self-medicate: inflammation has a depressant effect on the nervous system, and so they could be eating certain foods - perhaps dependant on them - to regulate their mood, stress, etc. This may work for some people their whole lives, it may also lead to dis-ease progression over decades.

And to reference your Paracelsus quote, it's not solely the dosage but a dosage that acts poisonous will differ between people. Some might be okay for some people, any tiny amount may be problematic for some people. The vague and arguably dismissive rhetoric of "everything in moderation" in response to when people reply in regards to people's comments on eating food they know is unhealthy for them and makes them feel sick. The dismissive behaviour of of parents for when their children not liking certain food and not wanting to eat it, they force or incentivize them to continue to eat food that harms them with a reward like dessert that further harms them is also problematic and I believe the starting point for many people who then struggle later in life in various ways. Eventually the child may become conditioned to not feeling the harm of the food, perhaps with the added aid of the numbing effect of the inflammation (the depressant effect on the nervous system), and become disconnected from a foundational cause or source of future dis-ease progression related symptoms. Parts of this pattern were certainly part of my journey.

You can criticize the health of anything like this. There isn't a comparison; how healthy is it compared to cow milk? The comparison to coke is ridiculous.

Some sugar and canola oil doesn't even seem bad to me, seems perfectly fine. Especially given that I think it tastes way way better than other alternatives, without making me feel sick and having ethical/moral issues.

Agreed; this felt like an unfair hit piece - if anything, I feel more comfortable drinking oatly (though perhaps not in large quantities).

It was disappointing that the author didn't discuss how much fiber is in oatly, and how that can affect health and glycemic impact.

The coke comparison felt particularly hypocritical - what's the glycemic load of 8oz of coke vs 8oz of oatly?

If the takeaway is supposed to be, "the glycemic load of oatly is a little higher than milk", well, that doesn't exactly convince me this is going to be the new cause if a major diabetes epidemic (which drinks like coke do have a hand in).

> Oatly compares their sugar to the sugar in cow’s milk, but they’re not the same sugar. Lactose, the sugar in cow’s milk, has a GI of 46. Since the GI is a measure of how much of a negative response your body has to certain sugars, the 7g of sugar in Oatly with its 100+ GI is actually potentially worse than the 12g of sugar in whole milk with a 46 GI. We can use something called the “glycemic load” to measure this, which gives us a GL for the sugar in 8oz of Oatly of 7.35, and a GL for the sugar in 8oz of whole milk of 5.52.

The "glycemic load" is just the result of the multiplication of the sugar mass by the glycemic index: 7x1.05=7.35 and 12x0.46=5.52; it would be more clear to simply state that.

The article was also cleverly worded in a way that I find a little hypocritical – they're only comparing the _sugars_ of the two beverages. Oatly also has more complex carbohydrates, including 0.8g of fiber, per serving.

A GL of 7 doesn't seem that high; a serving of almost any grain, including whole wheat kernels (11), are higher. Quinoa is 13. A ripe banana is 16.

Source: https://dlife.com/glycemic-index-chart-and-effects-of-low-an...

I was looking for a second opinion, and found the comment by Glenn in that article was a good counterpoint. I won't repeat it here, but another point that comes to mind is that one may use a very small amount of milk-substitute in your hot drink, compared to drinking a much larger amount of coke. So it's not perfectly comparable, even if they were equally bad.

I think "the new coke" just refers to the misleading marketing, no? But you're right of course.

Health claims surround milk substitutes, without the necessary evidence.

Dr Jason Fung writes about an over emphasis on data gathered from experiments with mice that guide public health recommendations. I think that's an important point. A lot of effects in animal studies haven't been observable in humans.

I haven’t yet read the article, but from the title, I thought it referred to Coca Cola’s inventor, John Pemberton, claiming[0] the drink was a cure for “many diseases,” ”including morphine addiction, indigestion, nerve disorders, headaches, and impotence.”

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca-Cola#History

It's not just for coffee though. You could use it as one would use milk e.g. add it to your bowl of cereal, hot chocolate, milkshake etc. and consume a larger amount in total.

Every time I read about products like this I can't help but think back to Michael Pollen's simple phrase on the cover of The NY Times Magazine:

Eat Food. Mostly Plants. Not Too Much.

The relevant paragraph:

"Once, food was all you could eat, but today there are lots of other edible foodlike substances in the supermarket. These novel products of food science often come in packages festooned with health claims, which brings me to a related rule of thumb: if you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid food products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a good indication that it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat."

https://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/magazine/28nutritionism.t...

Oatley is replacing half and half and the like for a lot of coffee drinks. It’s not like that dairy is good for you anyways...

There’s such an expectation that plant based substitutes should be amazingly healthy when often the things they’re replacing and pretty bad for you anyways.

Those products often replaced also have massive lobbying groups and ad campaigns they go up against just because they exist. Take “got milk” or “beef, it’s what’s for dinner” big expensive campaigns backed by big lobbies spouting dubious claims.

Comparing the glycemic index of pure lactose and maltose as proxies for dairy milk and oat milk is misleading. There are values for the whole products out there. The comparison still isn't favourable to oat milk, but implying it has a GI of 105 is absurd.

Characterizing GI as a scale of how bad a food is for you is also kinda simplistic.

I was surprised to see no discussion about environmental impacts.

One nasty consequence of non organic canola oil is that the industry largely uses glycophosate for pest control. The organic version of Oatly does not use canola oil, and Califa uses sunflower oil (and has less sugar!).

And yes, industrial cattle practices suck. But the cattle themselves aren't the inherent problem. In 1800 there were approximately 60 million wild Buffalo in North America. Today there are about 90 million cows, of them about 30 million used for milk. The environment has the capacity to support a similar order of magnitude of bovines sustainably. Sustainable cattle farming in some cases is even carbon negative [0]. Bovines historically played a big role in the grassland ecosystem but what industrial scale farms are doing look nothing like nature.

It's easy to vilify industrial scale cattle farming but it's not truthful to say that there are no ways to have environmentally friendly cattle farms.

[0] https://www.whiteoakpastures.com/meet-us/environmental-susta...

Still doesn't seem as "bad" nutritionally as regular milk. Oat milk is quite popular here in Finland, it's my understanding people choose it because of the environmental, moral and taste aspects, which the article doesn't mention at all.

What's wrong with sugar though?

I also don't buy the cartoonishly simplistic claim that "coca-cola is unhealthy". Does it cause obsesity? It doesn't "cause obsesity" in the same sense that ingesting more calories than you spend causes obsesity: It's not the coca-cola or the sugar by themselves.

The only thing wrong with sugar is overeating it to the point of ruining one's macro proportions and going into caloric surplus. Just saying that "sugar is unhealthy" is not true from a dietary perspective. A better statement would be "too much sugar is unhealthy".

Sugar and carbohydrates can severely negatively impact people, even in small amounts.

"[INSERT FOOD] for some people is unhealthy at any amount" is what should be always said. People then have to determine what those foods and level of foods are, it could be accumulative as well - where too much of a few different foods may be too irritating to your system.

Cheese has a high tyrosine content and turkey -- tryptophan. Should one always mention that those foods could cause adverse effects for people who are sensitive to those amino-acids? I think that's a bit over the top, like saying that walking is healthy, but not forgetting to mention, that it is not, for people with severe arthritis. That seems like a truism to me and if one has those type of ailments, they most likely know about it or should seek medical advice.

True and the biggest cause of that is bread, pasta and other complex carbs. You can't drink enough orange juice to get the same amount of sugar as a bowl of pasta without feeling sick.

Wait is bread and pasta, bad or good? I love bread and pasta.

Sugar also causes teeth caries.

A good place to start: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5TLzNi5fYd-dBPvkjtfO...

Sugar is readily accessible fuel, that's why you crave it. Complex carbohydrates and starches are the problem, not sugar. If you get a crash that's because you need to eat regularly, just like all the other primates. Fasting is an emergency state, not a normal one.

Have you ever felt tired and out of whack after eating fruit? Have you seen the size of people on a fruitarian diet? (Spoiler, they loose a dangerous amount of weight). You don't get fat by eating fruit and having an occasional soda, you get fat by eating lots of pasta and bread.

I challenge you to gain weight on a diet of steak and orange juice.

> Sugar is readily accessible fuel, that's why you crave it. Complex carbohydrates and starches are the problem, not sugar. If you get a crash that's because you need to eat regularly, just like all the other primates. Fasting is an emergency state, not a normal one.

If you get a 'crash', it's because your blood sugar level is too low. One way that this can happen is by eating refined (simple) carbs - aka sugars. The release of sugar into the blood-stream is fast, leading to a large release of insulin from the pancreas, which then drives the sugar in the blood stream into the cells, giving a consequent drop in blood sugar. Unless you then replenish the blood sugar you get a 'crash'. Far better is to eat in a way that doesn't give you that spike of blood sugar, so that the insulin response is less.

> Have you ever felt tired and out of whack after eating fruit?

No, not that I can think of specifically related to fruit.

> Have you seen the size of people on a fruitarian diet? (Spoiler, they loose a dangerous amount of weight).

Not sure what an anecdotal observation of people on a weird diet proves.

> You don't get fat by eating fruit

No-one said you did. And (spoiler) not all sugars are equal. Eating a piece of fruit is not the same as eating a piece of candy, just because they both contain (some wort of) sugar.

> you get fat by eating lots of pasta and bread.

(This is a weird and partly incorrect statement, but...) Who said this was about getting fat? There can be negative health effects from what someone eats, aside from weight gain.

> I challenge you to gain weight on a diet of steak and orange juice.

Not sure what this weird unbalanced diet would prove either?

Sugar is in every processed food we eat, leading to an over-consumption of sugar.

Sugar also has the tendency to make you want eat more of it, creating a negative feedback loop.

I'm from the home of Oatly, southern Sweden, Malmö. Most of my friends are vegan and even I buy Oatly just to avoid milk protein because I'm getting older.

BUT a lot of my vegan friends are shying away from Oatly now apparently because they're partially funded by a large Chinese state owned company.

And we actually have more locally produced alternatives to Oatly coming out here in Sweden, one is now launched in Stockholm but still waiting to spread down here.

I don't know Oatly, but it seems to be pretty much like an Horchata, which originated at least as far back as 13th-century Valencia, Spain.

I don't know about that but it's very simple. It's just oat based milk alternatives. Oat based drink, cream and stuff like that.

It doesn't taste like milk. It tastes like oats soaked in water. But it works for cooking, coffee and blending as a replacement to milk.

> anyone who's tried a latte with oat milk can attest it is by far the best tasting, most milk-like alternative

That's quite a bold & generalising statement. Personally I think cashew nut milk is the most milk-like alternative in terms of flavour and mouthfeel.

Oat Milk, even the very best, is syrupy and thick. I think most people looking for a latte without dairy are better off seeing the Milk Alternative’s flavors as their own thing rather than trying to replicate a dairy latte. There are a lot of upsides to be found if you stop chasing an impossible goal.

Notably, I found that a Soy London Fog is actually single-handedly a better drink than a milk London Fog...but it is different and if you are chasing a milk product you won’t find it.

Completely agree, I'd probably say my favourite latte is with almond milk, but I wouldn't call it a dairy latte alternative since it has a radically different flavour.

I found the same thing with yoghurt. Instead of trying to chase after a dairy alternative (like Alpro - which is a close flavour but wrong texture), I switched to coconut yoghurt. It's not going to fool anyone into thinking it is dairy, but none-the-less I think it is a superior switch in.

Huh, Oatly tastes really close to dairy milk to me, but some of the other oat milks I've tried are fairly bad. There's a huge variance. I don't think "syrupy" is a way I'd describe any of them, though, except perhaps the higher fat barista blends?

All plant milks taste like dirty sugar water to me. I've tried Oatly and found it slightly less sweet than others, but still not particularly good. Nothing about it is milk-like to me. It was as watery as all the others, I don't understand how the grandparent can find it "syrupy and thick".

I disagree. I have access to several different brands of oat milk, and some of them are sweet, some are not. The neutral ones declare less sugar than Oatly and they don't use any noteworthy amount of salt to balance things out. The brand I prefer declares sugar content at 3 grams per 100, which is a bit less than the nominal amount of lactose in cow milk. I of course understand that these two sugars' GI profiles are different, I'm just pointing out that there is such a thing as neutral non-viscous oat milk.

Personally I agree with that statement (for oatly), having tried every alternative milk including cashew nut. If there’s a specific brand you recommend I’m happy to try.

I'd recommend trying the Rude Health brand.

Alternatively, making your own nut milk is super easy. Just soak the nuts in 4x amount of water overnight, then blend, then strain... done!

Mm I find oat milk has a really weird aftertaste that I don't find pleasant.

Not to appear petty, or to give the impression that I care about internet points (full disclosure: I am and I do), but I posted this on HN with the exact same title and link 3 hours ago. Wondering how this didn't get flagged as a dupe?

Probably because OP posted it twice, the first time was 19 hrs ago.

I guess that kind of makes sense, thanks :)

solemnly looks out window contemplating points that could have been

I’m only guessing but I know that look. :)

I've started making oat milk. It's pretty good.

Base for my smoothies. Substitute for yoghurt. Mostly because COVID-19 has reduced my dairy and fresh leafy greens consumption. (Fiber from oats isn't the same, I know.)

For the enzyme, I use either honey or overripe banana. I generally let the oats soak in the blender for 30-60 minutes, hitting the button a few times if I remember.

For fats, I use either olive oil or coconut cream.

FWIW, this article's tone is a big turn off. It's good to point out high glycemic response, canola oil, and maltose. And I have no constructive comments about Coca Cola. But comparing oat milk to HFCS drinks is silly.

I can't help but feel pity for the author here. They've correctly been able to see through all of these tactics and psychological hacks employed by the marketing industry, but then they've gone on and tried to better themselves and made a big ol fool of themselves trying to do it.

The fact of the matter is that proving things and making a strong point in an argument is HARD. To really convince people about complex issues, you can't just make claims and then cite references. Complex issues will often have aspects where both sides can make well referenced scientific arguments in favour of their side. Hell, if tobacco could do it, why the author expects to do so much better when they try the exact same thing a few paragraphs later is beyond me.

I certainly don't have a great solution either here, but I can say that the things in my life which have nudged my thinking have not been better someone who cited a better reference, or who argues harder for one side. It's been someone who explains as much as possible about the underlying mechanisms involved, and why something is BOTH good and bad which is almost always the case. This usually takes around an hour or 2 of presentation, and is presented by someone who has done years of research in a field. That's what did it for me and sugar at least: https://robertlustig.com/sugar-the-bitter-truth/

I'm not convinced that Oatly is so tremendously bad, all things considered, and I forgive a little marketing-speak so long as they are being honest and forthcoming when engaged. That being said, I find the amount of "good for you" literature and products out there to simply be overwhelming. Do I want to know about what I put in my body? Sure. Do I want a PhD in nutrition? Umm...

There is a simple rule I follow which I, probably erroneously, call the Law of Nature. If you want to trust what goes in, make it yourself and make it with whole foods that you can see and touch. Why is a food refined? To make it easier to preserve, store, and transport or to modify it's consistency, taste, or nutritional characteristics. 99% of these refinements lead to a product which is less nutritious for you and likely bad for you in some way. Indulge occasionally but realize that most forms of modern food refinement is not natural, and our bodies have evolved over tens of thousands of years to efficiently consume what occurs in nature. If you need a lab or the bacteria doesn't seem to manifest magically, it doesn't meet my definition of natural.

I know this basically sounds like a Paleo plug, but my purpose isn't to define a practice you should follow. My main problem is information and deception. I don't have time to vet an entire grocery store of products, so I trust my evolution as a default. I want to feel comfortable and confident about what I consume rather than building an ideology out of it.

I think for the most part your philosophy is a good one, if you can afford it (in money and time). The problem is that for many people, healthy foods aren't as accessible. It takes more time to cook your own food, or places that sell fresh foods are not close by. Or you don't have time to make grocery trips more than once every two weeks. If you are a single parent working a full time job, it's going to be very difficult to find time to cook from scratch every night. That's why we have to move toward making food more healthful by default.

I only partly agree.

After 10+ years of baking my own bread, for example, it takes under 5 mins to drop my selfmade premix, or mix it there and then, in the bread machine. Preparing a sourdough and baking it off in the morning, takes a few times a few minutes, spread out.

Point is, baking bread, takes me less time than going to the bakers. And is cheaper. Same for making my own jams, tomato sauce, pizza, syrup, honey, veggie garden, veggy burgers, wine, beer. It all takes time, but mostly planning. Saves money if done right.

I realize that I'm priviledged with having space and opportunity to try and learn it all, but that is also because I pursued precisely that freedom and opportunity.

I liked the article but it could have been much simpler and shorter. I believe that non-dairy "milk" can be healthy, but I look for a few things on the label: the package should contain almost no carbohydrates and no added oil.

I just checked out our pantry, and indeed, the oat "milk" we have has more carbohydrates than I want, so that is off our shopping list. Other milk substitutes that I just checked met my criteria (various nut "milks", and hemp seed "milk").

Goodbye oat milk!

The low fat version of Oat-ly has no oil added. It’s not like the company is giving you no choice but to buy a product with “controversial” ingredients.

It turns out that oat "milk", even without oil added, has a lot of carbohydrates, some in the form of natural sugar.

Oats have a lot of carbs

The article makes great points. The most important one is that the carbohydrate content of Oatly is significantly greater than milk with a much higher GI sugar. It has a different sugar formulation which has double the impact (GI) on blood sugar as compared to Lactose (milk sugar). This alone makes it an extremely unhealthy choice as drinking 12 oz is certainly enough to spike blood insulin levels and cause a subsequent roller coaster effect on blood sugar. People are blindly flocking it to it because sugar tastes good and clever but misleading marketing.

We really need better nutrition education in society and better marketing controls on sugar.

> The most important one is that the sugar content of Oatly is not only significantly greater than milk, it has a different sugar formulation which has double the impact (GI) on blood sugar as compared to Lactose (milk sugar).

Let's see...

* 7g of sugar in a cup of a low-fat oatly https://www.fatsecret.com/calories-nutrition/oatly/low-fat-o...

vs.

* 12.5g of sugar in cup of 2% milk https://www.fatsecret.com/calories-nutrition/usda/milk-(2%25...

So you're factually incorrect.

You're also disregarding the fact that even 12.5g of sugar isn't terrible if the rest of your diet is generally sugar free, that some people are lactose intolerant, and finally that oat milk doesn't come with the same terrible externalities associated with the dairy industry.

Man, what is it about SEO marketers and writing about things far out their competency?

That feels like a shallow dismissal.

The above is just a expression of sentiment, the actual dismissal is found in other parts of the comments.

One thing to think about with any oat based product is whether or not the oats are organic or not.

In North America, it is common practice to spray roundup on the oats just before harvest. This prepares the oats for harvest at a pre-determined time, and so is less risky to the farmer. However, the amount of roundup in the resulting product is quite high.

The organic oats are traditionally farmed and do not have this problem.

EDIT:

The Oatly FAQ has a lot of interesting info related to this discussion.

https://us.oatly.com/pages/faqs

Errors in the article.

Oatley is no longer Swedish, it's owned by China Resources Verlinvest Health Investment Ltd, which is a partnership between an Belgian investor (Verlinvest) and the government of China (China Resources).

Due to history Oatly do have considerable market in Sweden, but swedish social media are starting to question the company due to it's ties with China and the Uyghur situation.

https://www.oatly.com/int/about-oatly lists other owners as well, but I couldn't find who owns what percentage.

The article mentioned Merchants of Doubt. I recommend following it up with Industrial Strength Denial https://www.amazon.com/Industrial-Strength-Denial-Corporatio..., which documents similar practices supporting industries like leaded gas, radium (promoted for health including injecting it and using it in suppositories), and slavery.

As an alternative to Oatly, I bought a soy milk making machine (used from Craig's List for $15). Like a rice cooker, it's not necessary but it does the job easily. It can work with rice, oats, cashews, etc. I make new soy milk every few days. Ingredients: soy beans and water.

The article doesn't mention the packaging, another similarity with Coke, but food packaging creates a lot of waste. Buying soy beans in bulk in reusable bags reduces a lot of that pollution.

Another great alternative to Oatly is water -- for hundreds of thousands of years the only beverage humans drank after weaning.

> The article doesn't mention the packaging

Every time I go to the grocery store I wonder why we haven't come up with standardized food boxes that you can just refill. Probably has to do with hygiene, but god I hate buying so much packaging...

About making soymilk: I do like the idea of making the soymilk I consume myself. I have not yet though found a way to utilize the okara (soy pulp) that is produced in the process. Do you have any tips what to do with it?

I use it like yogurt -- usually I chop fruit and and nuts on it, or I thicken my breakfast oatmeal with it. I don't sweeten it beyond fruit, though you could. You might also check YouTube. Actually I just did and it returns a lot of ideas: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=okara&oq=&gs_l=

Speaking of yogurt, I plan to start making soy yogurt too.

There is a fast food chain in Singapore which used the left over fibres in granola bars. At least that's what they said in a documercial: https://www.mrbean.com.sg/product-category/granola

The best use I found for it was making a kind of granola. I can't remember the exact recipie I used but a bunch come up when searching.

I'm on-board with the moral aspect of minimizing support for the dairy industry (though this topic is oddly never brought up), however, I just don't like the taste of Oatly's products. They are indeed too sweet. There are better-tasting oat beverage brands out there which declare less sugar (and without salt for balance). Soy milk works great, too.

Which other brands would you recommend?

I like the creaminess of Oatly - works well in coffee.

Other brands I tried (Alpro) were a bit watery and some use guam, which is an OK thickener ingredient, but doesn't go with milk alternatives in my view.

Maybe I'll look into making Oat milk - seems like a quick and easy thing to do.

The Swedish producer Trensums Food makes great oat drink varieties that I know are sold under different brands across Europe. I'm unfortunately only familiar with one of the Swedish brands, Coop.

"So now we have to ask ourselves: What’re the odds that we’ve learned our lesson and this will never happen again? Or could there be a new class of products running the same playbook, building billion dollar brands with clever marketing and deceptive health claims while secretly ruining our health?"

I straight up thought they were describing tech companies or the advent of social media/ad tech e.g. Facebook, Twitter, etc. and health claims being it makes you feel more connected with people, but it actually affects your mental health and creates addiction in negative ways we are just starting to comprehend.

I'd just like a comforting confirmation that "big milk" (sorry) hasn't had anything to do with this article.

Apologies, got a bit traumatized by documentaries "Bananas" and "big boys gone bananas".

I can’t say much about Oatly but milk has a huge impact on the environment that isn’t put in $ value. Cows are farmed in somewhat inhuman environments where their value is mostly for milk, meat and leather. If we did this to dogs and cats, people would never accept it but we’ve been desensitized that’s it’s okay to farm pigs, chicken and cows for human consumption as long as we don’t see how it’s made.

Then there’s the methane produced by cows which is 20x worse than CO2 as a greenhouse gas.

Author fails to mention that Coca-Cola (and most other soft drinks) have like 35 grams of sugar per serving, so even with maltose's higher GI, it's still nowhere near the blood sugar bomb that a Coke is. Comparing that to 7 grams of sugar per serving (of which "quite a bit" is maltose) is just completely unreasonable.

Whole piece similarly strikes me as dishonest and agenda-driven.

Yeah, a lot of claims with 0 sources doesn’t inspire confidence. So milk was never shown to be unhealthy, fat+cholesterol isn’t harmful but oat milk is terrible for you. Gotcha

Any recommendations for a different good-tasting, ‘healthy’ milk alternative, then? Porridge or cereal with water is inedible...

I've tried pretty much all variants of milk substitutes and found that they all disappoint me. The best way to enjoy porridge without milk is adding other flavors: mashed banana, raisins, cinnamon, grated apple, prunes, blueberries, cranberries, dried apricots... This goes for overnight oats as well.

Agreed. My general health tip is to stop contorting ingredients to reproduce other foods -- cookies made out of cheese, milk made out of nuts, cake without gluten, etc. Most healthy ingredients are tasty on their own terms, so lean into that.

Also, read up on other traditions for breakfast foods and drinks. Many are not nearly as high in carbs and dairy as the traditional American breakfast options.

Try applesauce for cereals, works for me. But all these foods are used in sweet meals that I feel I'd rather stay away from. Bacon & eggs is a better breakfast, salty nuts a better snack etc. ...

Quite the opposite. One just has to cook it over fire and add a banana, a bit of honey, agave or maple syrup. An cinamon, of course.

You probably haven't eaten buckwheat porridge. It's served in Russian jails. An acquaintance of mine who's been in such a jail claims it was quite good.

Same with hot chocolate drink made with water instead of milk. I had that served once and couldn't believe my eyes.

Coconut milk is the ONLY valid "alternative". It doesn't have quite the same nutritional profile (lower protein and sugar), but it's actually more favorable.

The best are without additive binders but some like gellan gum are safe in relevant quantities.

Almond Breeze almond milk, original flavor (don't get the unsweetened version).

That's way too sweet for my liking; for me, nothing comes close to Califia brand unsweetened original flavor.

I like soy milk, but I don't use it for porridge, I use it in my coffee.

I have to say though, if you can't compromise on the taste being different, then you'll have a very hard time switching.

Why doesn't soy milk work? There's soy milk and there's soy milk; the various brands taste quite different.

Thanks - I’ll give it a go.

Milk is healthy, there is a reason they used to give it to school age children on a government subsidized program. The new wave of alternative milk is an ethical one even if it poses as a health one. You don't get skinny by having a soy latte instead of a regular one, you get skinny by reducing your meal size and or frequency and eating whole foods.

You might want to have a look at this:

Health Concerns About Dairy - by Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine

https://www.pcrm.org/good-nutrition/nutrition-information/he...

Make your own oat milk. There are many recipes available online and the process is simple.

Personally I use nothing™

Califia unsweetened almond milk is a game-changer.

Coconut yogurt is pretty good and can work well.

what about just drinking water and eating berries? I kid you not, you will feel so much better.

Maybe I should try a serious comparison with berries specifically, but my personal experience is that I don’t get the same sustained slow energy release from fruit that I’d get from porridge or low GI cereal - I get hungry faster.

Why berries? Any coffee-like effects that they have? Or just because they're unprocessed fruit?

The new coke? No.

Until Oatly are complicit in the murders of organizing employees in countries they thought would save them billions [1], they do not deserve such a damaging comparison.

[1] https://prospect.org/features/coca-cola-killings/

I'm reminded of the scene in the "Last Emperor" when the young Emperor Puyi is weaned at a much later age from breast milk.

Have there been any studies on long term consumption of breast milk, well into adulthood? If you think about it, breast milk has many minerals and important nutrients, including endocannabinoids like 2-AG.

dang, this article is written by an SEO guy, and submitted twice over the past 20 hours, just by adding a hashbang. The history of the domain on HN shows this pattern a lot. Maybe you could look into it, but I guess this low quality hit piece is just another SEO fad and should be banned from HN.

email him with such concerns, random comments aren't necessarily seen

Note that the organic variety has no added oil, then again, it also has no added vitamins.

https://www.oatly.com/int/products/oat-drink-organic

Reminds me of this story: https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a29373/tobacco-an...

If you compare 100ml oatly to 100ml normal semi skimmed milk, it’s lower in calories, sugar, fat, has about 5 x less saturated fat, definitely doesn’t contain any hormones, antibiotics, casein, and probably doesn’t raise your igf1 either

1 cup of Oatly, which is a massive amount to put in your coffee, is 120 calories. That's not a big deal in the grand scheme of things. I put Oatly in my coffee every day and it's basically my breakfast.

Oatly is kinda weird, because it contains more sugar than most other oat milks, yet somehow manages to taste dull, I imagine the sweat on the walls of a damp cellar has a similar note.

So much hate for cow milk. I think grain-fed dairy needs to stop, but a quick look at the latest studies shows all cause mortality is lower for people that drink milk.

Canola oil causes intestinal distress in more people than you know, similar but more severe than lactose intolerance, but it is often considered an allergy. My partner and her mother are unable to digest / have a violent intestinal response to it.

It's extremely unpleasant for them, and in the long run could probably cause significant health issues related to nutrition absorption and increased inflammation.

Anyway. I'm convinced that many people have this issue and don't know about it. Information about this problem is not very widespread, and I'm unaware of any studies that attempt to explain its mechanism.

12 ozs in your coffee...ohhhkay. What a dumb article.

This whole article is full of wrong statements about healthy and unhealthy food. And I'm not taking only about the advertisements.

This article convinced me to give Parly a try. Been looking for a milk substitute that is closer to Coe milk than nut milks.

Wouldn't touch nut milks/seed milk unless I made it myself and got rid of all the lectins beforehand...

I got to “ maltose has the highest glycemic index, with a rating of 105 out of 100” and stopped reading there.

Would compare them to Mountain Dew, but the headline wouldn’t look as good.

TLDR; the sugars in Oatly have an extremely high GI and it contains Canola oil which has been linked to a variety of health issues. Their marketing cleverly dismisses or minimises these concerns in a similar way to the fizzy drinks or tobacco industry.

I was surprised that the article didn't mention the comparative lack of protein in Oatly when compared to milk, and as others have mentioned, it also ignores the ethical considerations.

Couldn't agree more. I really don't get the "fad" behind oat milk. I think it's just a lot of good marketing.

Personally, I prefer no added sugar almond, coconut, and hazelnut milk.

TL;DR: Oatly (oat milk) is primarily sugar and canola oil. Both are bad in large quantities.

The same can be said about milk - it's just sugar and fat, suspended in water. All 3 are bad in large quantities.

Except one has an industrial polyunsaturated fat, the other actually suitable for a mammal saturated fat. That's a huge difference.

I don't think that's quite what it says.

The article says the glycemic load is higher than of milk, but not anywhere near the glycemic load of 14 of Coke (or 16, depending on where you are in the world http://www.glycemicindex.com/foodSearch.php?num=516&ak=detai...)

This makes me think the title is at best referring the the over-the-top marketing, and at worst being pretty misleading.

Oatley has loads of different varieties. The sugar content in the barista one is low enough that I can drink 3 flat whites a day and stay in Ketosis.

The sugar content in the “Barista” edition is exactly the same as their ordinary version. Total calorie content is 59kcal/100mL versus the regular version which is 46kcal/100mL.

The difference is they add dipotassium phosphate to prevent separating when the milk hits the hot coffee.

By talking about “Low enough to stay in Ketosis” you are practicing the techniques discussed in TFA perfectly. Almost makes it sound like this special edition is lower in sugar, when it’s in fact the same sugar and higher calorie.

Are you concerned about weight loss? Why not just switch to espresso?

It also has oats, though only 10%.

Careful. Oatly's ingredient listing is potentially deceptive. The ingredients are listed as:

> Oat base (water, oats 10%), rapeseed oil, ...

That is, the oats make up 10% of the oat base, which is the most prominent ingredient, not of the entire product.

The other ingredients which I've elided are things like stabilizers, preservatives, and so on, so they likely don't account for more than 1% of the total product.

Now let's assume the worst case: that Oatly is 50% "oat base", and 49% canola oil, and 1% additives. This would be consistent with their ingredient labeling.

Then, Oatly would actually only contain 5% of oats.

I don't drink dairy due to intolerance and I find it disgusting possibly for the same reason. I also don't like any milk substitute so I'm out of any target demographic anyway. However, as far as I know according to traditional Chinese medicine milk is considered a big no no.

Do you rely on traditional Chinese medicine? Why would you do that?

I don't rely on it but I do get acupuncture from time to time. My wife is a tcm practitioner and I can vouch it works. I don't claim it substitute western medicine but it works very well along side it.

Try eating shredded carrots with coconut oil, olive oil and salt on an empty stomach once a day. In a couple of weeks try drinking milk again. If your milk intolerance is due to a bacterial overgrowth you should be able to tolerate it after that.

I find the taste of milk so abhorrent I rather drink piss than milk. I can only eat dairy after its been cooked.

> Try eating shredded carrots with coconut oil, olive oil and salt on an empty stomach once a day.

What does that do?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com