Comment by cribbles | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cribbles | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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.

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

They come in a bucket if you go to Starbucks

There is also a "short" version, but you have to explicitly ask for it. It's not on the standard size menu

A Starbucks Venti is 20oz (hence the name)

When you steam milk for latte the volume almost doubles so that probably 9 -10 oz milk, still not insignificant but not 20oz.

Venti hot is 20oz - Venti cold is 24oz

flat white and latte are 2 different drinks.

Thats exactly what a hipster coffee drinker would say.

Google says a flat white doesn’t have milk foam. So 1/3 less ingredients than a latte. A latte, cappuccino, and macchiato all seem way more similar. I’m here to argue that coffee is more normcore than hipster.

1/3 milk foam is not equivalent to 1/3 milk.

Similar amounts of milk prepared differently. It’s still not the difference between a cup full of milk and a splash of milk.

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.

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'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'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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Finn here, yes it's normal to drink milk. When I was growing up, the school lunch hall had big posters about how milk is important for your health.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Lactose intolerance is actually the original state for (adult) humans, while lactase persistence is an evolved adaption in cultures that drink a lot of unfermented dairy.

Which kind of proves that dairy is a significant enough part of many cultures' diet that it caused an evolutionary change! But these days you can buy lactase very cheaply in pill form, so really anyone can "have" the adaptation.

And many cultures with genetic lactose intolerance still consume a lot of fermented dairy.

>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.

Is it weird? Weird is completely abstract. Is eating the female component of a chickens reproductive output (aka an egg) weird? Is it weird to harvest oats and then harvest/extract enzymes, digest oats and mix them with processed rapeseed oil so we can avoid drinking cows milk?

At least if you drink -freshly- pasteurised cows milk you know there are fewer moving parts in the process of getting ingredient into your system.

Food wise everything is weird when you look at it under the right setting. Tofu is like the cheese of a soybean. Burgers are random bits of animal ground up flattened and fried. Mushrooms and fungi are weird almost alien growths. Fish are weird and slimy. Prawns are almost like giant insects from the sea.

When I think about attitudes towards food, I find it weirder that when we eat pork but are happy to throw away all the offal, cheeks, neck, knuckle, ears, ribs(!!!) and just keep the chops and some back for bacon because it is "weird" to eat all those other bits. Or with a chicken we eat just the breast and dump the rest. And look at Chinese people as weird for eating chickens feet. At least they don't waste the animals they eat!

It's like I said, it was an excuse to avoid drinking something I didn't like that much anyway. Yes, weird will always be subjective, thanks for clearing that up.

Fair enough. It wasn't meant as an attack - I get frustrated how arbitrary and social people's attitudes are with food.

The same people that consider mouldy Roquefort to be delicious might consider durian a sin against humanity with little appreciation of the hypocrisy at play.

> When I think about attitudes towards food, I find it weirder that when we eat pork but are happy to throw away all the offal, cheeks, neck, knuckle, ears, ribs

Recently on a different discussion board some guy mentioned that he wanted to thaw the fish and left it on a counter instead of in the fridge - after some time he noticed that apparently a fly left eggs on small part of it, after he saw that he threw it into trash. There were various reposnses from "ewwww, you did it right!" to "it was perfectly fine to cook" One of the responses which I remembered was: "you just wasted life and death of this fish"

These are very simple words and seemingly obvious but it caught me by surprise a bit and I noticed that not always I'm thinking about my food like this. In a world where food can be highly processed, where a fish, chicken, pig can no longer resemble living creature but just some meaty pieces it's easy (and comfortable!) to skip, ignore the part that it was living being. I played a bit with this thought in my mind and went into procrastination area - is it "fair" to use life and death of multiple animals and plants to sustain, propel myself and then do nothing productive with this energy?

> 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.

You seem to be saying that the human body cannot make productive use of the calcium from cow's milk. Do you have a source for this?

> 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.

Care to provide some proofs? I live in a post-soviet country and from stories I heard regarding USSR, even adults in factories received milk (for free) daily.

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

I get oat milk lattes reasonably frequently.

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

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.

> 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.

Do you cut it with pastry?

Bourbon and a nice dry cheddar are my goto when I need a serious unwind.

It's actually a combination of the tyrosine (an amino acid) and the high fat content that makes cheese so satisfying.

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

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

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

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

> 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.

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.

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.

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?

I honestly couldn't say, I've only made the batch listed in the link. It tends to keep pretty well, so I usually just make a jug of it and use it over the course of a few weeks. The cleanup can be a little cumbersome, so I'd rather do it in bulk and spend less time on the cleanup.

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

It takes a while for it to separate. I haven't passed it through our steam frother yet, I'll have to give that a run.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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...

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

Surely they are. They are one possible example.

Salads aren’t bad because McDonald’s gives you one with a dressing with 900 calories in it.

And that example has a cinnamon sugar syrup added to it.

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

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).

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.

Whole Foods does. There's also bulk grain stores most everywhere there's "regular" grocery stores, but of course far fewer because there's little demand for such. Bulk goods also trivial to buy online.

I honestly never thought to try online just because I was worried about food safety during shipment. I could try Whole Foods but everything I've bought there in the past has been massively overpriced. I haven't shopped there since Amazon acquired them though, our local chain has been fine for most of my needs, besides bulk goods.

Amazon works for bulk nuts, as well as Costco.

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 :)

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.

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