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.
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.
> 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. Oatly’s glycemic load is about 33% higher than milk’s is!
I find it kinda hilarious that despite this Oatly is very popular in vegan/new age/alternative circles. If I was a vegan I would rather drink organic soy milk.
I have similar feelings. The organic soymilk I buy has two ingredients: water and sugar. Reading the ingredient list on oat milks always makes me a bit uneasy in comparison.
I do sometimes buy oat milk though since it does go better with tea.
Or almond milk, which actually tastes good compared to soy milk and oatly.
If you look at men who are vegan, they are almost always weak and feminine. Maybe that's just the kind of individuals that get drawn into a vegan diet, but I think there might be something else in play.
What are you talking about? I am talking about the vegan diet in general. There is a lot of stuff you're excluding in that, not only milk.
There is evidence that doing "manly stuff" for men, like hunting, increases testosterone production. Also a lot of food like red meat, eggs etc increases testosterone production. Something vegans don't eat.
No, that is not what I am saying. I am saying that being vegan most likely results in lower testosterone, which is a basic hormone that is very important for males.
It is important for all aspects of mens health and well being, especially when you get older.
“Vegans had 13% higher T [testosterone] concentration than meat-eaters and 8% higher than vegetarians.” Not only did vegan men have as much testosterone as meat eaters, they actually have 13% MORE of this manly hormone. On the flip side, too much testosterone can be a bad thing because it leads to higher levels of IGF-I – a risk factor for certain cancers. Surprisingly, the report also found this: “Vegan men had on average 9% lower IGF-I levels than meat-eaters.”
Well, yes. For example, the more of it you have, the likelier you are to develop prostate cancer in later life, and to have worse outcomes from that cancer. That definitely seems important. And eating lots of red meat also lowers your sperm count and quality, apparently (1) - which seems important too, at least if you're interested in siring lots of strong and healthy sons to carry on your line. Which I assume would be important, but who knows? For all I can tell based on what you've said so far, you could just have a taste for really butch tops. Which, fair! Same here. But I don't really feel the need to inquire as to their diet.
Yes, but the trade-off is they spend most of their adult life being called "SOYBOY" by "real men" with inferiority complexes. No sane person would want that.
It's mostly owned by a Belgian company, Verlinvest (40%). Which is a venture capital company run by the families behind Inbev (the beer company). After that it's 30% owned by a Chinese company. At least according to Wikipedia. On their own website they list some more owners but without any percentages.
Ok, but it's not "swedish" anymore at least. Even if the chinese ownership is 30%, it's still the state of china that owns a large part of it which is enough for me to never buy that product again.
Also, they have sponsored a festival outside Gothenburg in Sweden several times where they banned regular milk in the area, citing that it's bad for you.
That's ok to me, most of the stuff I buy is not made by a local company. We live in a globalized world after all.
I assume you mean Way out West? Oatly does seem like a good fit there so I wouldn't be surprised. That's been a vegetarian festival since 2012. Vegetarian as in they don't sell any meat. Non-vegetarians are of course welcome to party along.
Oatly's marketing is quite tongue in cheek yes, it's part of their image.
But cow milk in general (and especially in Whole Milk form) is well proven to be unhealthy in the quantities usually recommended.
There’s a good reason why nobody else drinks milk like Americans do. (Who were advertised to insanely aggressively and back room dealings brought about things like making Milk a standard in US schools.) Oatly is still really bad but the root problem is that in the US we drink more milk than anyone else...and we really don’t need it.
>But cow milk in general (and especially in Whole Milk form) is well proven to be unhealthy in the quantities usually recommended.
Do you have a source on that statement? What are the quantities that are usually recommended, and by whom are they recommended?
>There’s a good reason why nobody else drinks milk like Americans do.
That's simply not true. The Scandinavian countries all consume more milk per capita than the US. Coincidentally, Scandinavia is also where Oatly is from.
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.
I asked my vegan friends if they’d rather these animals would not exist at all rather than be used for milk production (because they are only bred into existence for that).
I wonder how that logic applies to humans born into living in rough countries, would vegans rather they would not exist at all?
It’s not like a dairy cow has a life of eternal suffering after all. It eats, grazes, rests and socializes. It does cow things.
I suggest you look up "factory farming" before making claims like "It’s not like a dairy cow has a life of eternal suffering after all". They literally don't do any of the activities you mention.
I know dairy farming very, very well. It varies between areas. In France for example, there are no mega farms, all farms are small to medium, many family owned. Hormones are banned. This is true for other parts of Western Europe.
Mega Farms are mostly an American issue. I do not support them at all.
This is substantially incorrect, especially for France [1]:
While cows indeed aren't grown in intensive farming in France, 95% of pork in France is raised in intensive factory farming, and other species have similar stats. Most of the western world has similar stats.
I was specifically talking about dairy farming. Pork, chicken and beef all have their own issues.
The average USA farm size is about 220 cows vs. about 70 cows in France, and the practices used in Europe as a whole are more humane (my numbers are from closed market studies published by IFCN).
These animals are very well monitored and cared for. I wouldn't want to change place with them, but then I also wouldn't trade places with many other humans around the world.
You have made broad, sweeping remarks about the ethics of dairy farming and it's only here that you considerably narrow the scope of your statements to farms that you deem ethical.
Yes, some farms may operate in line with an acceptable standard of ethics, but for many people, it is easier to live a vegan lifestyle than to carefully ensure that all their dairy is ethically sourced.
Dairy cows exist because we actively breed them. We inject dairy cows with sperm to keep them pregnant so they keep producing milk, then take their calf away and repeat the process. They're not multiplying on their own.
That’s exactly my point. With no utility, these animals would not exist. Are their lives so miserable that we can morally assert that they should not be living?
It’s like saying: these are my children, without me they wouldn’t exist, I can subject them to anything and they should be happy that they have existence.
I would argue that no existence is better than existence filled with endless misery, agony and pain.
Factory farms are a disgrace to humanity. It is my opinion that until we develop enough compassion to see this and stop, humans have no hope of creating lasting peace amongst each other. Our morality has a deadly wound at its core, and it’s rotting away at our souls.
I mean you could extend this argument to anything, should we all be procreating all day every day to ensure every possible life is lived? Should dogs be forced to have 10s of litters? Should we encourage insects?
The answer to all of these is obviously no. So why do you make the case for cows?
I'd recommend some more research into the how cows in dairy farms are treated. Your description is rather more idyllic than the reality, I think. For one, most male calves are not needed on a dairy farm, so they are either slaughtered for veal, raised as beef cattle, or euthanized at birth [1]. Whether this matter to you depends on where you stand on vegetarianism of course, and anyway the issues with the wellfare of meat herds is not what I wanted to discuss.
The dairy cows are also not quite so happy, I think. Mastitis is a potentially fatal disease of the udder, usually caused by bacteria entering the teat; many of the practices on a dairy farm make this far more likely, and while of course the farmers are doing all they can to stop it, it is still one of the biggest issues in the industry, and it seems that some level of mastitis is expected in all dairy herds [2]. It is perhaps a side note to the animal wellfare aspect, but the use of antibiotics is a big part of the mitigations, and seems to be administered as a matter of course; this is an issue because it promotes antibiotic resistance in bacteria, which has implications for humans too.
There are other wellfare issues around overwork of cows from producing much larger amounts of milk than they would to feed a calf, whether grains are a healthy food compared to grasses, and even mental health issues such as separating cows from their calves and whether they have enough access to the outdoors.
I've tried to select links that are balanced and non-hyperbolic, but it's tricky to do. Like I said, I recommend more research but try not to be too turned off the hyperbolic articles on both sides. Articles from vegans are often under-researched and manipulative, but if you dig around you'll find that many of the issues they discuss are real. On the other hand, farmers are of course not animal hating devils and so write to defend themselves and their livelihood, but they can often go the other way and underplay the issues that are there.
And finally, animal wellfare is not the only argument for veganism, because livestock has an environmental impact comparable to the transport industry [3].
I also imagine drinking diluted cows pregnancy and chronic inflammation hormones with extra cortisol on top from all the stress they experience because of their living conditions can’t be beneficial for you as well.
> 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).
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
The HFCS in every milk substitute that sells is the ultimate subsidy crop. Soy and rice are as well. Dairy isn’t profitable for farmers and is rapidly declining as beverage giants and more politically powerful agriculture interests push their policy goals.
The environmental arguments aren’t very convincing to me. I grew up in an agricultural area where dairy was king and there was a diversified crop economy. Now it’s corn+fertilizer. Carbon impact may be lower, but the impact on the environment is more than carbon. Water depletion in the Midwest, pollution from runoff and over utilization and other factors matter too.
I don’t really see how water depletion is a relevant issue when most cows are being fed grain and soy.
Vegans probably ignore the harms of monoculture in their arguments. But a lot of meat eaters like to point to studies of how cattle and sheep can graze on land that can’t support other agriculture. Sure, but what % of cattle are actually raised that way? How much does a burger or gallon of milk cost when it’s grass fed.
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.
I think unsweetened almond milk is maybe the best overall pick if you want a milk substitute. From my understanding it's fairly healthy, natural, and the taste / "mouth feel" is good. Downsides are cost and maybe the amount of water/bees used to make the almonds.
I'm also a fan of almond milk from a taste perspective, but I've always been a bit unsure about how it is processed – and the amount of water used is definitely an ethical downside in my book (I used to live in California, where this was a controversy during times of drought).
After a bit of research just now, though, there don't seem to be many credible claims of commercial Almond Milk's chemical processing being very scary (at least compared to Oatly, which also has a few additives) so that doesn't seem too problematic to me.
This article discusses the environmental impact of various milk alternatives:
> Greenhouse gas emissions: a 200ml glass of oat milk is responsible for around 0.18kg of CO2e. That’s slightly more than almond milk, but less than soy or cow’s milk.
> Swedish oat milk producer Oatly put the greenhouse gas emissions of a litre of their oat milk at 0.34kg, which is a lot less than the general estimate above of 0.18kg per 200ml
> Water: a litre of oat milk needs about 48 litres of water produce. In terms of water, then, oat milk is much lower impact than other milks.
The takeaway for me is that I might prefer oat milk to almond milk for "health/eco impact" reasons by a very narrow margin, but would strongly prefer either to cow's milk for those reasons.
100ml == ~3.4oz, so that's probably still a pretty equivalent amount of sugar to oatly. Either way, they're pretty negligible – most juices have at least 20g sugar in a cup.
I think almond milk tastes awful, Oatly was the first milk substitute I actually liked (maybe preferred!) to dairy milk.
Currently I rotate through Oatly, Califa farms, and Silk oat milks depending on what's available.
The water footprint of almond milk is just mind-blowing. I can't fathom ripping out other productive agriculture so that we can suck up more water than other crops just to sell almonds overseas and turn it into.. milk.
Soy milk is just as reasonable environmentally and probably a little healthier as a nutrition source compared to oat milk. Though the flavor of soy is a little harder to get used to.
Are you referring to the normal Oatly or the Barista version? Because the normal one doesn't work for coffee, but the latter is the best coffee milk I've had. I used to use real cream but actually now prefer that Oatly, it's that good.
> 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.
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."
The article mentioned Merchants of Doubt. I recommend following it up with Industrial Strength Denialhttps://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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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 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.
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.
Carrots are an indigestible fibre so they carry the coconut oil into your small and large intestine. Usually the coconut oil would be absorbed rapidly. The coconut oil then kills the bad bacteria lining your gut. The carrots on their own also absorb some of this bacteria and are excreted. You can do the same thing with bamboo shoots if you don't like carrots.
The evidence for this specific effect is pretty weak at the moment, but it's all good natural food anyway so you have nothing to loose. It worked for me so I'm passing it on.
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 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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
The brand of soy milk popular for coffee etc. in Australia is Bonsoy (japanese brand), and it's worth giving a try. They did poison people a few years back, but that's a price worth paying for good tasting soy, right? In my travels I've found that most soy milk consumed around the world is pretty awful. I don't know why. There's a lot more variance in its taste than with most other cow's milk substitutes.
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. ...
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.
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.
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.
Saturated fat doesn't increase all cause mortality and yes if you are lactose intolerant it's bad for you, maybe even carcinogenic.
Also this article is an advertisement for a book "The cheese trap" another pop science, pop nutrition sensation I'm sure. Nutrition was better before everyone and their dog was trying to sell a book, diet plan or health product.
It's the only book in the further reading section, this is an advertising piece. Why would I read another pop science nutrition book by a physician? I trust a physician to sew my leg back on or treat my obscure rash but nutrition books are a racket, read the source material instead.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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!"
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.
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?
> 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".
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 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.
If you're concerned about the taste of Avocado oil you may have just had poor quality oil. I've had some bad experiences, but the one from Chosen Foods (we have it at Costco in Ontario) is a very neutral oil with a high smoke point.
I don’t know where you’re getting this from. I use canola oil when pan-frying food and it stands heat better then most olive oils. The cold-pressed variety tastes like shit though (well, actually it tastes like canola which has a kale-like flavor that I find unappealing). The refined canola oil is perfect for frying.
Right, I think what he's saying is that you shouldn't use cold-pressed oils for cooking/frying. Cheaper refined oils are better for this purpose. Keep the fancy cold-pressed oils for salads, dipping, drizzling, etc.
Refined olive oil does have a slightly higher smoke point than refined canola/rapeseed oil, but for most home cooking purposes it's probably within the margin of error. Something like refined sunflower oil or refined avocado oil has a higher smoke point still.
> Extra virgin olive oil (EVOO) yielded low levels of polar compounds and oxidative by-products, in contrast to the high levels of by-products generated for oils such as canola oil.
But I formed my position from many other points, the degradation in public health in the USA has tracked perfectly with the switch from animal fats to seed oils for cooking (and other uses but frying is the worse offender)
Any idea where I can find that study? The link above is dead. I have been using Canola oil for frying because I thought it was a neutral tasting oil that didn't produce as many toxic compounds when exposed to high heat—vs olive oil which purportedly did produce them. Seems I've been misinformed.
It also tracks perfectly with increased calorie consumption.
So one potential explanation is that people are eating more, and then another potential explanation is that there is some as yet mysterious biological process whereby processing calories through some long extant metabolic pathways triggers changes in health.
It might be good from a culinary perspective, perhaps smoke point is irrelevant, I was thinking of what causes degradation of the fats when subjected to heat.
From memory the good stuff in olive oil is destroyed by heat (if you swallow olive oil and it's good quality, you get a distinct 'burn' at the back of your throat).
Also IME olive oil loses its interesting taste rapidly when cooked with, but others may not find that.
The smoke point of olive oil varies significantly from extra light to extra virgin. Extra virgin actually has a much lower smoke point than canola oil.
Most allergies are to a protein in the thing you are allergic to, and refined oils that have a high smoke point usually have all of that removed (or it would cause the oil to smoke.) I have a peanut allergy but can eat anything fried by a cheap restaurant in Sysco peanut oil while I have had a reaction to something done by a three star restaurant because they used unrefined oil (looking at you Manressa...)
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).
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".
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.
I seldom eat too much of anything, but bread makes me glee with happiness. I don’t think I’d like to live in a world without bread. I love how it smells, I love how it tastes, I love how satisfied I feel after eating freshly baked bread.
Probably not the answer you’re expecting but damn I love avocado toast, pizza, naan, french toast, burger, croissants and any form of bread.
I don’t care if I die a few years early, I love bread.
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.
Do we ideally want an educated, self-aware population who have a better chance of self-regulating - or the opposite? Similarly do we want discourse to be more lazy and simplified or to be more detailed When is it coddling, when is it laziness?
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?
>One way that this can happen is by eating refined (simple) carbs - aka sugars.
Refined carbs are complex carbs not simple sugars. Fructose in fruit is a simple sugar, sucrose (table sugar) is a simple sugar. Bread, pasta and anything containing wheat is a complex refined carb. There are refined sugars however like high fructose corn syrup which btw doesn't have the same composition as normal fructose, hence the deleterious effects. Refined carbs cause insulin problems more than fructose from fruit, that's why you never feel bad after eating fruit but you can get a food coma after eating too much pasta. The reason is because your body releases the insulin before the complex carbs are fully broken down lowering your blood sugar to below normal levels. With fructose because it is so bioavailable your insulin and blood sugar spike at the same time, in sync, resulting in normal blood sugar levels and a stable mood and energy level. When you start eating cake is where you get into trouble because it contains, guess what... refined carbs in the form of flour. That's why you feel just as bad after eating a lot of bread as a lot of cake despite one having a lot more sucrose. Sucrose is fairly similar to fructose. It's the not sucrose that's the problem, it's the complex carbs.
>Not sure what an anecdotal observation of people on a weird diet proves.
These people pride themselves on eating 3000+ calories a day and are dangerously skinny. What I'm saying is you can't get fat eating just fruit. These people are also incredibly unhealthy and I wouldn't recommend anyone eats like that but I think it does prove the point that the sugar in fruit is not the same as normal sugar.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
> 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
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.
Sure, from a vegan perspective you can stop the entire meat and dairy industry completely based on the fact that it's not strictly necessary for our survival, but a lot of things aren't strictly necessary for our survival. You can also argue that humans have an ethical responsibility to be "more" and that because of this we shouldn't consume anything that causes suffering in living beings. Both of these arguments come out of personal ethics though.
In ethical terms, most people simply do not feel that the suffering of animals is equal to that of humans. One may not agree with this, but it's why people eat meat in the first place, or accept animal testing for medicine. So, as long as "specism" is the reigning morality that people subscribe to, it's unlikely we'll see a vegan wave, unless perhaps there's a climate component driving it as well.
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.
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).
> 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
What are you going to do with the cows after 5 years into their 20 year life span when they stop producing as much milk? I can't see any way you're going to make people against animal slaughter happy with the only practical option.
If you're going to approach every animal life as a profit calculation, completely ignoring the moral argument made by vegans, obviously the answer will always be what you expect it to be. There's no point in having an honest discussion if you phrase every question from your own assumptions of morality and practicality instead of asking open questions.
Also, I'm not a vegan so I'm not going to debate you on this.
> 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.
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.
> 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
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?
> 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?
Instead of doing nothing because there aren't any perfect solutions, start by aiming to minimise harm when there's realistic options to do so? e.g. avoid cow milk in favour of oat or soy milk.
Dairy cows eat crops from industrial farming as well so if you're concerned about insects dying, less diary will likely help e.g. you could make milk directly from soy beans instead of feeding them to cows.
I think most people acknowledge that just by existing they’re causing harm. If you cut meat and diary out of your diet, you’re vastly reducing that harm. This isn’t just taking into consideration the cows, it’s also the vast quantities of crops that are grown to feed livestock. The largest study done on farm use was done by Oxford University a couple of years back and they found that “80 percent of the planet’s total farmland is used to rear livestock.” It continues with “freeing up land mass the size of Australia, China, the EU, and the U.S. – combined. This would lead to immensely fewer greenhouse gas emissions. It would also lessen the amount of wild land lost to agriculture, which is one of the leading causes of mass wildlife species extinction.”
So for me, it ends at the meat and diary have a huge negative impact on the environment and I’ll do my best to reduce my share by avoiding meat and diary.
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.
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.
After posting that I kept digging and got slightly different numbers. Annual milk consumption from Wikipedia is just over 600lb per year in the US, where another source listed 500 lb (Might be milk vs milk + dairy products or an approximation?) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_milk_cons...
185.7 billion lb / 9.4 million cows = ~20,000 lb per year * ~5 year lifespan ~100k lb. https://albertamilk.com/ask-dairy-farmer/how-long-does-the-a... However, I am not sure it’s a clear comparison as this may be excluding calf’s from these counts. Which would drop lifetime production closer to 60,000lb and better line up with other sources.
PS: Of note dairy cows are also consumed for meat, though generally of lower quality. Which further muddles the issue suggesting that reducing milk consumption might simply increase the number of beef cattle ~1:1 to compensate.
> 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.
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.
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
“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 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]
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.
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...
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 263 ms ] thread> 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.
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.
> 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. Oatly’s glycemic load is about 33% higher than milk’s is!
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.
Oatly is owned by a Chinese company so it's not very Swedish anymore. They claim bullshit like cow milk is bad and spread a lot of vegan propaganda.
It's a really crap company with crap interests.
If you look at men who are vegan, they are almost always weak and feminine. Maybe that's just the kind of individuals that get drawn into a vegan diet, but I think there might be something else in play.
There is evidence that doing "manly stuff" for men, like hunting, increases testosterone production. Also a lot of food like red meat, eggs etc increases testosterone production. Something vegans don't eat.
It is important for all aspects of mens health and well being, especially when you get older.
“Vegans had 13% higher T [testosterone] concentration than meat-eaters and 8% higher than vegetarians.” Not only did vegan men have as much testosterone as meat eaters, they actually have 13% MORE of this manly hormone. On the flip side, too much testosterone can be a bad thing because it leads to higher levels of IGF-I – a risk factor for certain cancers. Surprisingly, the report also found this: “Vegan men had on average 9% lower IGF-I levels than meat-eaters.”
(1) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4180710/
Both soy and almond have bad reputations in terms of ecological impact.
If one can get the same nutrition from oat, it's a pretty big win environmentally.
Also, they have sponsored a festival outside Gothenburg in Sweden several times where they banned regular milk in the area, citing that it's bad for you.
I assume you mean Way out West? Oatly does seem like a good fit there so I wouldn't be surprised. That's been a vegetarian festival since 2012. Vegetarian as in they don't sell any meat. Non-vegetarians are of course welcome to party along. Oatly's marketing is quite tongue in cheek yes, it's part of their image.
But cow milk in general (and especially in Whole Milk form) is well proven to be unhealthy in the quantities usually recommended.
There’s a good reason why nobody else drinks milk like Americans do. (Who were advertised to insanely aggressively and back room dealings brought about things like making Milk a standard in US schools.) Oatly is still really bad but the root problem is that in the US we drink more milk than anyone else...and we really don’t need it.
Americans are 17th on milk consumption per capita: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_milk_cons...
I don't think the 16 countries above it are usually considered unhealthy.
I can make water unhealthy if I recommend high enough or low enough quantities :)
Do you have a source on that statement? What are the quantities that are usually recommended, and by whom are they recommended?
>There’s a good reason why nobody else drinks milk like Americans do.
That's simply not true. The Scandinavian countries all consume more milk per capita than the US. Coincidentally, Scandinavia is also where Oatly is from.
TBF lot of the meat replacements are plagued by similar problems. [1]
[1] https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/impossible-and-beyond-ho...
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.
Also cows milk has pretty grave health implications for the cows
I wonder how that logic applies to humans born into living in rough countries, would vegans rather they would not exist at all?
It’s not like a dairy cow has a life of eternal suffering after all. It eats, grazes, rests and socializes. It does cow things.
Mega Farms are mostly an American issue. I do not support them at all.
This is far from a US-only problem.
[1] https://www.liberation.fr/france/2018/06/04/porcs-bovins-vol...
Yes, some farms may operate in line with an acceptable standard of ethics, but for many people, it is easier to live a vegan lifestyle than to carefully ensure that all their dairy is ethically sourced.
I would argue that no existence is better than existence filled with endless misery, agony and pain.
Factory farms are a disgrace to humanity. It is my opinion that until we develop enough compassion to see this and stop, humans have no hope of creating lasting peace amongst each other. Our morality has a deadly wound at its core, and it’s rotting away at our souls.
The answer to all of these is obviously no. So why do you make the case for cows?
The dairy cows are also not quite so happy, I think. Mastitis is a potentially fatal disease of the udder, usually caused by bacteria entering the teat; many of the practices on a dairy farm make this far more likely, and while of course the farmers are doing all they can to stop it, it is still one of the biggest issues in the industry, and it seems that some level of mastitis is expected in all dairy herds [2]. It is perhaps a side note to the animal wellfare aspect, but the use of antibiotics is a big part of the mitigations, and seems to be administered as a matter of course; this is an issue because it promotes antibiotic resistance in bacteria, which has implications for humans too.
There are other wellfare issues around overwork of cows from producing much larger amounts of milk than they would to feed a calf, whether grains are a healthy food compared to grasses, and even mental health issues such as separating cows from their calves and whether they have enough access to the outdoors.
I've tried to select links that are balanced and non-hyperbolic, but it's tricky to do. Like I said, I recommend more research but try not to be too turned off the hyperbolic articles on both sides. Articles from vegans are often under-researched and manipulative, but if you dig around you'll find that many of the issues they discuss are real. On the other hand, farmers are of course not animal hating devils and so write to defend themselves and their livelihood, but they can often go the other way and underplay the issues that are there.
And finally, animal wellfare is not the only argument for veganism, because livestock has an environmental impact comparable to the transport industry [3].
[1] https://www.dairy.com.au/dairy-matters/you-ask-we-answer/wha...
[2] https://www.pubs.ext.vt.edu/404/404-233/404-233.html [3] https://news.trust.org/item/20180918083629-d2wf0
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 HFCS in every milk substitute that sells is the ultimate subsidy crop. Soy and rice are as well. Dairy isn’t profitable for farmers and is rapidly declining as beverage giants and more politically powerful agriculture interests push their policy goals.
The environmental arguments aren’t very convincing to me. I grew up in an agricultural area where dairy was king and there was a diversified crop economy. Now it’s corn+fertilizer. Carbon impact may be lower, but the impact on the environment is more than carbon. Water depletion in the Midwest, pollution from runoff and over utilization and other factors matter too.
I don’t really see how water depletion is a relevant issue when most cows are being fed grain and soy.
Vegans probably ignore the harms of monoculture in their arguments. But a lot of meat eaters like to point to studies of how cattle and sheep can graze on land that can’t support other agriculture. Sure, but what % of cattle are actually raised that way? How much does a burger or gallon of milk cost when it’s grass fed.
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.
After a bit of research just now, though, there don't seem to be many credible claims of commercial Almond Milk's chemical processing being very scary (at least compared to Oatly, which also has a few additives) so that doesn't seem too problematic to me.
This article discusses the environmental impact of various milk alternatives:
https://medium.com/@tabitha.whiting/what-milk-should-you-buy....
> Greenhouse gas emissions: a 200ml glass of oat milk is responsible for around 0.18kg of CO2e. That’s slightly more than almond milk, but less than soy or cow’s milk.
> Swedish oat milk producer Oatly put the greenhouse gas emissions of a litre of their oat milk at 0.34kg, which is a lot less than the general estimate above of 0.18kg per 200ml
> Water: a litre of oat milk needs about 48 litres of water produce. In terms of water, then, oat milk is much lower impact than other milks.
In comparison, a liter of almond milk needs 386 liters of water to produce, and cow's milk, 1016, as per https://treadingmyownpath.com/2017/04/20/is-almond-milk-bad-....
The takeaway for me is that I might prefer oat milk to almond milk for "health/eco impact" reasons by a very narrow margin, but would strongly prefer either to cow's milk for those reasons.
I guess it still contains oat sugars though, at 3.2g per 100ml (of 7g carbs per 100ml)
Currently I rotate through Oatly, Califa farms, and Silk oat milks depending on what's available.
The water footprint of almond milk is just mind-blowing. I can't fathom ripping out other productive agriculture so that we can suck up more water than other crops just to sell almonds overseas and turn it into.. milk.
Although some point out that any plant-based milk is significantly better for the environment than mammal milk:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jan/28/what-pla...
I think they suck in coffee (so does Oatly) but they are good for cereal or smoothies or just liquid protein.
Almond and coconut milk have very limited amounts of protein.
Are you referring to the normal Oatly or the Barista version? Because the normal one doesn't work for coffee, but the latter is the best coffee milk I've had. I used to use real cream but actually now prefer that Oatly, it's that good.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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...
Speaking of yogurt, I plan to start making soy yogurt too.
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.
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.
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.
Alternatively, making your own nut milk is super easy. Just soak the nuts in 4x amount of water overnight, then blend, then strain... done!
What does that do?
I actually love carrots as snacks, though I'm not sure how well they'd go with coconut and olive oil. Have to try I guess.
Do you have any sources about coconut oil killing the bad bacteria in the gut?
Here is what I have found and what motivated me to try it: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6768601/ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240584401... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5109859/
Please let me know if it works for you or you find more research on the topic!
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca-Cola#History
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.
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.
The best are without additive binders but some like gellan gum are safe in relevant quantities.
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.
Health Concerns About Dairy - by Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine
https://www.pcrm.org/good-nutrition/nutrition-information/he...
Also this article is an advertisement for a book "The cheese trap" another pop science, pop nutrition sensation I'm sure. Nutrition was better before everyone and their dog was trying to sell a book, diet plan or health product.
And have you read the book?
But hey, I guess you know better than 12,000 physicians.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4532752/
It's the only book in the further reading section, this is an advertising piece. Why would I read another pop science nutrition book by a physician? I trust a physician to sew my leg back on or treat my obscure rash but nutrition books are a racket, read the source material instead.
Did you actually look at the fact sheet on that page? It's not just something some physicians pulled out of thin air.
And PCRM's team does include experts in nutrition.
And your meta study link wasn't really conclusive; yes the association is low but suggesting that more high quality studies are needed.
Fact is in modern western societies you don't need dairy products and plant-based milks are less resource intensive compared to diary milk, see:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-46654042
i.e. health isn't the only factor why someone might want to reduce or give up dairy products.
I have to say though, if you can't compromise on the taste being different, then you'll have a very hard time switching.
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.
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
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.
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...
(it's not a particularly useful result at that point, I agree)
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.
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
Huh, same in the UK too - I wondered why on earth it would say that on a bottle of mustard oil, now I know!
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=...
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.
Personally, I prefer no added sugar almond, coconut, and hazelnut milk.
solemnly looks out window contemplating points that could have been
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".
Does cold-pressing rapeseed/canola seed turn it into a relatively healthy cooking oil (vs the expeller-pressed or chemical extraction process)?
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.
Refined olive oil does have a slightly higher smoke point than refined canola/rapeseed oil, but for most home cooking purposes it's probably within the margin of error. Something like refined sunflower oil or refined avocado oil has a higher smoke point still.
> Extra virgin olive oil (EVOO) yielded low levels of polar compounds and oxidative by-products, in contrast to the high levels of by-products generated for oils such as canola oil.
But I formed my position from many other points, the degradation in public health in the USA has tracked perfectly with the switch from animal fats to seed oils for cooking (and other uses but frying is the worse offender)
So one potential explanation is that people are eating more, and then another potential explanation is that there is some as yet mysterious biological process whereby processing calories through some long extant metabolic pathways triggers changes in health.
Also IME olive oil loses its interesting taste rapidly when cooked with, but others may not find that.
* Rat
* 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
* Rat
(Oh, and the article is written by a SEO marketer)
I definitely read this as "obesity in transgender mice" the first couple times and was seriously wondering if that was actually a thing.
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.
Probably not the answer you’re expecting but damn I love avocado toast, pizza, naan, french toast, burger, croissants and any form of bread.
I don’t care if I die a few years early, I love bread.
"[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.
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.
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?
Refined carbs are complex carbs not simple sugars. Fructose in fruit is a simple sugar, sucrose (table sugar) is a simple sugar. Bread, pasta and anything containing wheat is a complex refined carb. There are refined sugars however like high fructose corn syrup which btw doesn't have the same composition as normal fructose, hence the deleterious effects. Refined carbs cause insulin problems more than fructose from fruit, that's why you never feel bad after eating fruit but you can get a food coma after eating too much pasta. The reason is because your body releases the insulin before the complex carbs are fully broken down lowering your blood sugar to below normal levels. With fructose because it is so bioavailable your insulin and blood sugar spike at the same time, in sync, resulting in normal blood sugar levels and a stable mood and energy level. When you start eating cake is where you get into trouble because it contains, guess what... refined carbs in the form of flour. That's why you feel just as bad after eating a lot of bread as a lot of cake despite one having a lot more sucrose. Sucrose is fairly similar to fructose. It's the not sucrose that's the problem, it's the complex carbs.
>Not sure what an anecdotal observation of people on a weird diet proves.
These people pride themselves on eating 3000+ calories a day and are dangerously skinny. What I'm saying is you can't get fat eating just fruit. These people are also incredibly unhealthy and I wouldn't recommend anyone eats like that but I think it does prove the point that the sugar in fruit is not the same as normal sugar.
Sugar also has the tendency to make you want eat more of it, creating a negative feedback loop.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In ethical terms, most people simply do not feel that the suffering of animals is equal to that of humans. One may not agree with this, but it's why people eat meat in the first place, or accept animal testing for medicine. So, as long as "specism" is the reigning morality that people subscribe to, it's unlikely we'll see a vegan wave, unless perhaps there's a climate component driving it as well.
I have first-hand knowledge of "the dairy industry". I don't see cruelty. Can you fill me on what's cruel about it?
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).
What are you going to do with the cows after 5 years into their 20 year life span when they stop producing as much milk? I can't see any way you're going to make people against animal slaughter happy with the only practical option.
Also, I'm not a vegan so I'm not going to debate you on this.
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.
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.
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
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?
Instead of doing nothing because there aren't any perfect solutions, start by aiming to minimise harm when there's realistic options to do so? e.g. avoid cow milk in favour of oat or soy milk.
Dairy cows eat crops from industrial farming as well so if you're concerned about insects dying, less diary will likely help e.g. you could make milk directly from soy beans instead of feeding them to cows.
So for me, it ends at the meat and diary have a huge negative impact on the environment and I’ll do my best to reduce my share by avoiding meat and diary.
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.
For total milk production from Wikipedia “ The United States dairy herd produced 84.2 billion kilograms (185.7 billion pounds) of milk in 2007” https://www.statista.com/statistics/194302/number-of-beef-an.... Lists numbers of beef and dairy cows.
185.7 billion lb / 9.4 million cows = ~20,000 lb per year * ~5 year lifespan ~100k lb. https://albertamilk.com/ask-dairy-farmer/how-long-does-the-a... However, I am not sure it’s a clear comparison as this may be excluding calf’s from these counts. Which would drop lifetime production closer to 60,000lb and better line up with other sources.
https://extension.sdstate.edu/how-much-meat-can-you-expect-f... Suggest a typical cow at 490 lb of beef and this https://www.nationalchickencouncil.org/about-the-industry/st... gives annual beef consumption of 58.1 lb beef per person per year (2019).
PS: Of note dairy cows are also consumed for meat, though generally of lower quality. Which further muddles the issue suggesting that reducing milk consumption might simply increase the number of beef cattle ~1:1 to compensate.
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.
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.
What faux ethical arguments are those? Oat milk is less resource intensive and reduces animal cruelty - those are compelling ethical arguments to me.
Oat milk is made with rapeseed but cow's milk is made with rape seed.
> 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....
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.
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.
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.
Could you explain what you mean without using the word "respect" so I can understand your definition of it?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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?...
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.
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