Milk and dairy products: good or bad for human health? (2016) | Hacker News Reader

Milk and dairy products: good or bad for human health? (2016)

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

46 pointsmythhouse102 comments

> Anne Raben is recipient of research funding from the Dairy Research Institute, Rosemont, IL, USA and the Danish Agriculture & Food Council.

> Tine Tholstrup is recipient of research grants from the Danish Dairy Research Foundation and the Dairy Research Institute, Rosemont, IL.

> Sabita S. Soedamah-Muthu received funding from the Global Dairy Platform, Dairy Research Institute and Dairy Australia for meta-analyses on cheese and blood lipids and on dairy and mortality.

> Ian Givens is recipient of research grants from UK Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), UK Medical Research Council (MRC), Arla Foods UK, AAK-UK (both in kind), The Barham Benevolent Foundation, Volac UK, DSM Switzerland and Global Dairy Platform. He is a consultant for The Bio-competence Centre of Healthy Dairy Products, Tartu, Estonia, and in the recent past for The Dairy Council (London).

> Arne Astrup is recipient of research grants from Arla Foods, DK; Danish Dairy Research Foundation; Global Dairy Platform; Danish Agriculture & Food Council; GEIE European Milk Forum, France.

> He received financial support from dairy organisations for attendance at the Eurofed Lipids Congress (2014) in France and the meeting of The Federation of European Nutrition Societies (2015) in Germany.

Emphasis mine.

How is your comment anything other than an ad hominem/poisoning the well?

How is it anything other than a fact?

It is factual, but that doesn't make it not poisoning the well.

Sources are still important. Biases are real no?

Pointing out conflicts of interest is not an ad hominem attack.

Just to take you more seriously than other commenters

An ad hominem is an attack against the person and not the argument, and, well, you got a point there. I think what would make it a fallacious argument is if the attack against the person was irrelevant - pretend instead they shared incidents of inexcusable rudeness, which would be bad but irrelevant to the published findings. Instead it is highly relevant. Conflicts of interest undermine trust because they pervert outcomes. This is a situation where trust is very important, hence pointing out conflicts of interest to the person is relevant to the research.

Poisoning the well refers to pre-emptively discrediting a persons argument. Which, yeah, I could see that. Again though the information is relevant and in this case means that you should closely scrutinize their findings before use, as opposed to accepting them at face value due to a damaged trust.

I don’t think it makes sense to apply definitions from formal debate broadly to other contexts. If you had made the argument yourself that you implied by invoking those names you would have seen why they didn’t apply. It allows for extremely lazy rhetoric where you disregard any statement that makes some one look bad as an ad hominem. In a debate it makes sense to separate arguer from argument - in most other contexts it does not. You don’t separate the plumber from their previous plumbing, and you shouldn’t separate the report, the science, the scientists, the fucking statistics from the funding.

The sad state of nutrition (and pharma and fake meat studies) is that this is everywhere...from meat to diary to plants to Adventist Church sponsoring studies which (obviously) confirms their vegeterian-interwined faith.

The same goes for "plant milk" studies etc...which people like to compare real milk to.

Some extra info on diary:

Traditionaly most cultures eat fermented diary (cheese, kefir,...) NOT raw milk.

Mongols etc... who are known to drink milk drink horse milk, which has a different nutritional composition than cows milk, so eg people saying "Mongols drink milk bro so you should also bro" forget to mention that they don't drink the same milk as we on the west do.

> Traditionaly most cultures eat fermented diary (cheese, kefir,...) NOT raw milk

Raw milk is sorts of dangerous and unpractical, that's why we pasteurize it first, most cultures didn't had access to pasteurization so they managed in other ways to preserve it longer

It is important to differentiate normative from prescriptions

Raw milk is very dangerous and impractical if you're living in an urban area in the early modern era, when the milk had to be transported long distances to get to you, particularly before refrigeration.

But if you live in a pre-modern dairy farming community, then raw milk is very practical and not particularly dangerous. There's no doubt that people in such communities drank a lot of it.

Your “most cultures” claim ignores most of eastern Europe where it’s perfectly traditional to drink milk straight from under a cow.

Urban population doesn’t do it anymore, same way how most people no longer use an outhouse or bring their water from the well, but visiting traditional rural villages in my childhood I was offered milk straight from a bucket from a freshly milked cow that just returned from a pasture. They also made cheese, butter, cream, fermented kefir, etc, for the same reasons Irish have a million potato dishes.

What I described is true for Belarus, Ukraine, Russia, Poland, but I strongly suspect is widespread everywhere where people own cows in their household.

It’s just odd to see a claim that “most cultures mainly drink fermented milk” declared with such certainty.

Yes there’s a conflict of interest. No, it does not necessarily invalidate the result. Claiming that it does is actually quite insulting to the scientists involved. Making that claim without even a cursory examination of the study design is just being a shit disturber.

Study says it assesses the "totality of scientific evidence" but conveniently ignores all of the scientific evidence for the negative side effects of dairy. It is a very stupid study.

>conveniently ignores all of the scientific evidence

You should justify this assertion by highlighting the ignoring you claim occurs in the study. Here is a study with similar conclusions whose authors do not appear to have conflicts:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00394-012-0418-1

That study has a far narrower scope, and neither looked at all health impacts from milk consumption because the literature isn’t there.

“Milk and dairy products: good or bad for human health? An assessment of the totality of scientific evidence” did look at many health impacts and all cause mortality which is a proxy for heath. But it didn’t particularly get into why it was dismissing studies showing decreased lifespan associated with milk consumption beyond listing studies showing the reverse. By comparison it spent a while focusing on why the association with colorectal cancer may not be an issue.

That said, there isn’t a good way to measure all health impacts from specific foods because total health is so complicated. On top of this there are many confounding factors, presumably Truffles could be linked to health because consumption is linked to wealth. But nobody wants to publish “Milk: not extremely poisonous, more research needed.”

The studies aren't doing the same thing. Yours looks at only the effects on obesity, cardiovascular, and metabolic disease. The OP's study purports to look at all health effects.

I agree that I have also been quite surprised by their bold claim that their meta-analysis has included "the totality of available scientific evidence".

An example that this claim is false is that there is no mention about the studies that have identified a correlation between the galactose intake (which comes from the lactose contained in dairy) and eye cataracts.

From my anecdotal experience, because I have seen at least 4 cases of eye cataracts at people for whom dairy was a major part of their food, I believe that this association of galactose consumption with eye cataracts is true.

Fortunately, nowadays for those with enough money and with access to a modern ophthalmology clinic eye cataracts are no longer debilitating due to the surgical replacement of the lenses. Nevertheless, it cannot be considered as a minor health issue, because not everybody is so lucky.

The meta analysis of dairy that I have seen suggest there are health benefits, especially for cultivated dairy (cheese, yogurt, etc). Do you know otherwise?

There is nothing wrong with consuming a moderate amount of dairy products.

However the justification for this must be that you like their taste, not for supposed health benefits.

Dairy contains a lot of nutrients and it is certainly preferable to many kinds of industrially-made food that are filled with dubious ingredients, colorants, flavors, sweeteners, oils and so on.

On the other hand, in order to claim "health benefits", it would have been necessary for dairy to be a superior source for the included nutrients, which it is not.

For proteins, a better source is lean meat, e.g. turkey breast or chicken breast, for fat much better sources are the vegetable fat sources, which allow the selection of an optimal fatty acid profile, for calcium a much better source is a supplement like calcium citrate powder, which allows the choice of any desired daily intake without disturbing the daily intakes for the other nutrients.

It is good to enjoy dairy, but one should not try to rationalize this preference as being motivated by health concerns.

It depends what you’d substitute into your diet instead. Meta studies I’ve seen show lower mortality for people consuming cheese, butter, yogurt, sour cream, etc. Which suggests to me that the average person chooses worse substitutions.

I don’t see why you’d include it in your diet if you don’t like it. But assuming you do, the evidence seems to suggest it won’t hurt you. It may even be better than common substitutes (like butter over margarine.)

Funding can introduce biases independently from the intent of the scientist.

Let’s say scientist A assuming something that positively biases their research and scientist B assumes something that negatively biases their results. By choosing which person gets vastly more funding you can leverage those differences.

Of course that’s hardly the only influence funding sources can introduce, but I don’t want to suggest anyone specific did something wrong without evidence.

I guess it depends on whether you believe in the funding effect.

If you do think funding biases the work, then insulting scientists abusing science to push products isn't too bad, right?

> insulting to the scientist

Sounds very hermetic as a rejoinder. This way the cigarette industry could promote healthy smoking, because you know, scientists.

But you are right, lets have a closer look:

"Ian Givens is recipient of research grants from UK Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), UK Medical Research Council (MRC), Arla Foods UK, AAK-UK (both in kind), The Barham Benevolent Foundation, Volac UK, DSM Switzerland and Global Dairy Platform. He is a consultant for The Bio-competence Centre of Healthy Dairy Products, Tartu, Estonia, and in the recent past for The Dairy Council (London). Arne Astrup is recipient of research grants from Arla Foods, DK; Danish Dairy Research Foundation; Global Dairy Platform; Danish Agriculture & Food Council; GEIE European Milk Forum, France. He is member of advisory boards for Dutch Beer Knowledge Institute, NL; IKEA, SV; Lucozade Ribena Suntory Ltd, UK; McCain Foods Limited, USA; McDonald's, USA; Weight Watchers, USA. He is a consultant for Nestlé Research Center, Switzerland; Nongfu Spring Water, China. Astrup receives honoraria as Associate Editor of American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, and for membership of the Editorial Boards of Annals of Nutrition and Metabolism and Annual Review of Nutrition. He is recipient of travel expenses and/or modest honoraria (<$2,000) for lectures given at meetings supported by corporate sponsors. He received financial support from dairy organisations for attendance at the Eurofed Lipids Congress (2014) in France and the meeting of The Federation of European Nutrition Societies (2015) in Germany."

So basically they covered Givens and Astrup.

The very fact that scientific research has its ethics and is bound to be open to conflicts of interest should make everyone skeptical of the outcome: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2700754/

Regarding other studies: https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/milk/

Can you point to an actual error in the design of the study (please reference away, I want to know study flaws) and not just attack the scientist?

It could be scientifically dubious for reasons that are not related to the scientists' methods or integrity directly. For example if the funding source makes it less likely that they would have published a negative result.

Such factors are not evident by simply examining the study, but still allows exploiting science to promote a message.

This!

That’s a valid and fair point, unless the study was registered ahead of time to protect against that.

What rubs me wrong about the study is that they're inconsistent in their approach to dairy versus plant-based drinks.

Their sections on the health effects of dairy are very high level, focusing on meta-analyses and controlled studies. They go out of their way to emphasize how rare lactose intolerance and milk allergies are. However, when they get to talking about plant-based drinks, they're happy to reference individual cases of malnutrition as somehow meaningful, and make up for the absence of research by attacking the ingredients lists of some specific drinks.

In the end they acknowledge that the studies on plant-based drinks are lacking, but they give the two a far from even-handed treatment.

So, yes, the funding doesn't necessarily bias the results, but it seems to me that it has here.

Plant based “milks” are seriously lacking nutritionally compared to dairy. You don’t need a study for that, reading the back of the carton will do. Almond milk, especially, is flavored water. Still, I agree about the inconsistency you point out.

Almond milk is idiotic in many ways, especially considering how much water it takes to grow them.

Oat milk is a much better option.

>Yes there’s a conflict of interest. No, it does not necessarily invalidate the result.

Yes, same way a mail from an Nigerian ex-prince wanting to get money out of the country and will compensate you from helping them, might still be legitimate. You never know.

But if we can't go and rerun the research ourselves, it's best to see the red flag and assume it's rubbish than accept it in the off chance "the dozens of conflicts of interests might not have influenced it".

Conflict of interest in studies is not invoked to mean the study IS invalid, it's invoked to say the mean the study is very likely invalid.

Probability matters here. How many Nigerian princes that reach out to random strangers are for real? 0 to a large number of significant digits. How many studies with conflicts of interest are invalid? I suspect less than half until you show me numbers to the contrary.

>How many studies with conflicts of interest are invalid? I suspect less than half

More studies are invalid than valid, so studies with conflicts of invalid would put it much further below 20% chance...

“How the dairy industry designs misleading studies” - https://youtu.be/VYHiT7wJFk0

Although I'm pro-milk, I do find these connections suspect.

In modern times, most of us agree that we should "follow the science". But few people are actual scientists, who can check the facts themselves. Instead, we treat "follow the science" tribally and accept as "scientific" whatever source we trust by other (non scientific) means. For example, we trust as "scientific" people with the same political alignment.

As such, I find it pretty useless whenever I hear about a study saying "x is bad/good for you". It's not like I can check. (There's a website listing headlines about how eggs, sleeping, and the rest, both cause, prevent, and have no effect on cancer, obesity, and the rest. I can't find it right now though.)

The only guiding principles I find useful are:

* has it been used for multiple decades, centuries, millennia => probably good

* has it been banned in multiple countries => probably bad

Should we drink milk and eat meat in the same meal?

Thanks for pointing this out. I skimmed the report and was mildly curious about their sources of funding, but I was too lazy to do the searching to find what you did.

There is a textbook on bovine health and the first few lines of the preface say:

"This book is not dedicated to my wife. Nor is it dedicated to one of the many colleagues who have been instrumental in bringing it into existence. Instead, it is dedicated to the foster mother of the human race... the dairy cow."

  The totality of available scientific evidence supports that intake of milk and dairy products contribute to meet nutrient recommendations, and may protect against the most prevalent chronic diseases, whereas very few adverse effects have been reported.

I'm going to just go ahead and draw the conclusion that this also INCLUDES ice cream and milkshakes!

~~Coffee~~ Chocolate comes from beans, so a mug of hot chocolate is basically vegetable soup.

Edit: it's been a long day.

Coffee comes from a stonefruit. Vanilla is a fruit. Maybe if you used soy milk!

Hmm, coffee or chocolate?

Yes, sorry, typo. Chocolate is a bean.

And a vanilla soy latte is a three-bean soup!

Fun fact: Ice-cream is the food that most closely resembles breast-milk, nutritionally. So how bad can it be? ;-)

(I guess the answer depends mostly on what you think about saturated fat and sugar. If you believe both of those are fine, ice-cream is A-OK. I eat it a lot and seem to do alright.)

(At least, ice-cream in the traditional sense -- milk, sugar, maybe eggs, whatever flavors. Sadly many of the ice-creams you'll see on the shelves these days have all kinds of weird fillers and stuff; whether those are healthy or not is a whole 'nother question.)

Just bear in mind that breast milk helps a baby triple its weight in a year :)

Yes, it's a good point!

A similar data point is men of the Bodi tribe, normally quite skinny, have a contest to see who can get the fattest during a 6 month period: the technique the men use to get fat is to eat a lot of blood and milk.

So dairy definitely has a lot of weight-gain potential, if you eat enough of it!

(Though interestingly even the fattest Bodi men are still not as fat as the people you'd see any given day in, say, an American Walmart.)

Ice cream and milkshakes are perfectly fine deserts. One simply shouldn't eat too much desert.

I thought about it many times, and my conclusion has been that at least up here in the north were people barely survived year after year, - if giving up the farm animals and living from potatoes fruits and berries alone had been healthier, someone would hqve accidentally discovered it and everyone would have saved an awful lot of hard work.

So, clearly it has been useful.

For me it is today too: I often replace my lunch with 1/2L of whole milk, and if I have to a few hours extra after dinner, 1/2L of milk is often my solution then too. But I admit this might not be for everyone.

Is that a fair comparison? Did everyone or anyone have unlimited options for substitute calories and nutrients without milk? How does modern factory farmed dollar per liter milk compare to the milk back then?

> and my conclusion has been that at least up here in the north

That is partially why I am trying to hedge my bets here.

Cows convert material that is inedible to humans (grasses) to materials that are edible to humans (cows).

Modern farming has made things much easier - crops are highly modified and farming techniques have advanced to produce huge yields.

Consider also that redundant food supplies protect against famine - if your potato crop all dies then ol’ Bessy means you still have options.

Cows also represent an astounding fraction of Earth’s biomass, livestock is 5% of all animal biomass, twice as much as humans and 10x more than all wild mammals combined:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/humans-make-110000...

The gene that allows adults to digest milk is a mutation that occurred in Scandinavia and had such survival value it spread like wildfire throughout the human race.

Just this morning I was watching a YouTube video with Peter Attia and Layne Norton. Attia asked Norton for 3 things related to nutrition that he has changed his mind about in the last few years and which have led him to a change in coaching advice or protocols.

Norton said he no longer aligns with people who discount the risks of LDL and argue for the LDL/HDL ratio instead. Layne recognizes the linear relationship between LDL and heart attack risk. Layne also said he’s on statins.

Which blew my mind. Given his age and PhD he’d still rather eat meat — against his own concerns for LDL — and take a pharmaceutical instead of directly addressing the source of his cholesterol issues.

Relevant because of the prevalence of dairy and meat as the source of cholesterol in the modern diet.

The video: https://youtu.be/jmYeMmUjBrE

Correct me if I'm wrong, but dietary cholesterol is not main driver of serum cholesterol, right?

Very easy to eat a vegan diet and have very high cholesterol. And vice-versa.

Lots of lifestyle issues with serum cholesterol, but per the Mayo clinic plenty of dietary sources contribute to high serum cholesterol too, including meat and dairy:

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/high-blood-ch...

Presumably Norton isn’t having issues with a lack of exercise or high body fat.

I listened to the same podcast, and your making a huge jump in logic from your second to third paragraph with a lot of assumptions that weren’t discussed there.

He's written a book, documents his lifting on Youtube, and has been tweeting his own very opinionated positions on nutrition and food intake for many years. Maybe there's a jump on my part, but "huge jump in logic"?

Cholesterol is hardly a good predictor of heart attack or heart disease. I think it ranks 8th? Less than 10%.

Over 75% risk factors Are, in descending order: type 2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome, HTN, obesity, smoking, high triglycerides.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/article-abst...

Is there anything that could take meat's place? Presumably we wouldn't want to just eat a lot more carbs and instead eat something that's got a similar amount of protein (the thing that seems to make meat nutritionally unique). Legumes of all kinds seem to give me and a lot of other folks digestive issues.

Fish? I think the issue is high cholesterol, high fat meat.

All nutritional science is everything but science.

Ignore studies. Eat Lindy. Eat no fruits from the past one thousand years, drink nothing from the past four thousand. Drink your milk (if your ancestors did).

Lindy?

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

Guessing it's actually this:

https://twitter.com/lindydiet/status/1297211546934939651?lan...

She tastes terrible, but I've heard she's good for you.

> Eat no fruits from the past one thousand years, drink nothing from the past four thousand. Drink your milk (if your ancestors did).

Where do I find all of this expired food?

In Ayurveda warm milk was always the go to cure for Indian Hindu sages for centuries, mixed with Haldi (tumeric) and Adarak (ginger). However more recently Cows are injected with growth hormone, estrogen, then fed masses of pesticide and fertislier ridden crop to fatten then, followed by large scale antibiotics. All of this is now making milk an inferior product. Watch cowspiracy, game changers and fed up for more info.

Bad for me! Lactose intolerance sucks :(

And these days they spoil palm oil with dairy!!

Try Culturelle and dairy with probiotics like yogurt. This seemed to resolve my lactose intolerance and IBS type symptoms.

My wife is lactose intolerant. Over the last 10 years, many manufactures are starting to provide dairy products that are lactose free.

Lactase drops makes it simple to convert milk and cream cheese to being lactose free at home.

Green Valley has butter, cheddar and mozzarella! We've tried making lactose free mozzarella before at home, but it was always a disaster.

Breyers has lactose free ice cream.

Organic Valley makes most of it's dairy products in a lactose free variety.

I been drinking lactose free milk. tastes great. no stomach issues whatsoever. my local super market has about 4 different brands of lactose free milk.

They tend to be sweeter but my experience is similar - it is identifiably milk and I’m not sure I’d notice in a blind taste test.

Oat milk is another alternative I’d recommend. It isn’t a substitute per se, you are going to notice a difference, but it has similar mouth feel, tastes good, and I’ve used it in all the same places as milk (cereal, cookies, hot chocolate) and been pleased with the result.

Lactose free milk also lasts longer against spoilage.

There was a time the lactose-free choices in the US were very low, I love seeing major brands now carrying lactose-free products. Especially Breyer's ice cream, that was an eye-opener.

What if "milk and dairy" was a bad abstraction?

What if we should consider cows (or chicken for eggs) as transformation mechanism where the inputs matter as much as the outputs?

I think there are studies showing chemical differences depending on the feed - at least for chicken roaming freely vs kept in a cage.

I wouldn't be surprised if similar differences were found for milk and dairy, depending on grazing freely vs being fed some premade mix.

I've been experimenting lately with different forms of dairy. For as long as I can remember, cow's milk has given me issues with acne and other related skin/inflammation issues. It's not lactose intolerance, since I get no stomach issues, and drinking lactose free milk is no better (even ghee still gives me problems). So then I tried sheep dairy. No such symptoms. Then I tried goat dairy -- but was not so lucky. The confounding factor here though is that both my cow and goat dairy were purchased at a regular grocery store and my sheep dairy was purchased by some guy selling direct at the farmer's market.

anyone drink a2 milk?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A2_milk

Seems like an interesting product journey, someone in 1990 finds a1 is associated with disease and a company is launched in New Zealand, years later the EU finds no effect of A1, but it keeps getting sold regardless.

Unrelated/extra info:

I drank milk throughout my life ( Milk is part of daily meal in Asia ). I never had any problem related to milk. Then few years ago I moved to USA. First thing I noticed was milk. It felt like drinking heavily diluted milk. I tried 1%, 2%, whole milk, milk with Vitamin D, Organic milk. You name it , I have tried it. It also gave me stomach ache, constipation. I got to know that I am lactose intolerant. That was weird to know since I drank milk my whole life and never had any problem.

Recently one of my friend suggested A2 brand milk saying he also felt all milk in USA tastes watered down milk. And oh my god it tastes exactly like what I used to drink. I don't have any issue like constipation or stomach ache. So I am guessing no more lactose intolerant! It's been more than 2 years I am on A2 brand milk. Recently Costco stopped selling A2 brand milk and instead started selling Kirkland brand A2 milk. That milk is horrible but for now I dont have any other option.

Huh? I thought lactose intolerance was most widespread in Asia.

The dairy industry wants us to think that humans are weak and frail, with crumbling bones and teeth, and we can only be strong and healthy if we live in symbiosis with the bovine and drink their mothers milk.

A bit dramatized for effect, but that's about how milk was pitched when I was growing up.

Personally these days I think it's a tough idea to sell.

A perfectly healthy-for-all elixir of pure human energy and nutrients: is it possible?

Soylent?

Lindy effect strikes again.

Tl;dr: good

The conflict of interest stuff at the bottom is interesting, especially with the rise of non-dairy milk alternatives surging in popularity.

I personally think dairy milk production is abhorrent, worse than meat production even, and hope we as a society can move past it.

As has previously been pointed out, I don't think Toyota would pay for a study in dairy product healthiness. But the bit about non dairy milk seems crowbarred in since they didn't really compare.

I think dairy in a lab would probably beat meat in a lab to market. It seems like a simpler problem. I think we will almost certainly move beyond both in the next thousand years, maybe even the next hundred. You’ll get your wish.

I guess you live in the US? Maybe you could just change your farming practices to be more like the rest of the world.

> dairy milk production is abhorrent, worse than meat production even

What makes you say this? (I'm genuinely curious.)

I don't know that I'd call it abhorrent - dairy cows in Ontario seem to have relatively decent conditions compared to pigs and chickens, for example. The thing that makes me reserved about it is the very high water and energy cost per calorie of milk. While I'm okay with oat milk in my coffee, though, other dairy substitutions don't work nearly as well in my experience.

Animals bred for meat production are mostly left alone, dairy cows are constantly impregnated and typically have their young taken from them.

> > the rise of non-dairy milk alternatives surging in popularity. >

I purchased a half gallon of "Soy MilK" out of curiosity and now I understand the popularity. It tasted like a milkshake and seemed to have about the same sugar content. This product was designed for addiction.

There is no way that I would ever give this to my kids.

There are tons of milk alternatives many of which do not have any added sugar or amounts far far below a milkshake.

Yes, there are, but isn't it sad that when people forgo dairy for purported health reasons, most of the time they switch to the standard alternatives that are heaps of cane sugar (Silk soy/almond) and/or vegetable oil (Oatly / oat milk)?

>most of the time they switch to the standard alternatives that are heaps of cane sugar (Silk soy/almond) and vegetable oil (Oatly / oat milk)?

If they lack reading comprehension sure. It isn't difficult to compare nutrition labels and get something healthy.

It's not difficult, but they're still the most popular. Everyone drinks the standard vegetable oil Oatly. It's like a liquid oatmeal cookie.

I've never heard of Oatly, but then again I just sorta grab whatever unsweetened almond milk is on sale when I'm in the rare mood for milk. Looking up Oatly makes me feel like I live under a rock for not recognizing it.

Sorry, it's too late for you. That single glass of soy milk had enough estrogen to feminize an entire city block.

Also, there's non sweetened soy milk like there's non sweetened dairy milk.

That’s because you probably got the one labeled ‘vanilla’ that yes is effectively a milkshake. Now that I think about it, it’s pretty weird. We don’t have ‘white chocolate milk’ right next to regular with only very subtle marking differences. Hell, even slight fat content differences tend to be prominently labeled in the form of color coding.

Have you considered buying the non-sweetened stuff before going on a tirade against alternative plant milks?

You've basically bought the SunnyD of soymilk.

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