Oatly: The New Coke? • Hacker News Board

Re: Oatly: The New Coke?

#181

Post by rguzman » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 1:06 PM UTC

xfiz wrote: post #152

The author should write a similar article about himself, because the whole article is filled with dubious claims and misguided evidence. The two main claims are "Since the GI is a measure of how much of a negative response your body has to certain sugars" and "research showing harms from canola oil". Neither can be ascertained. A big problem with nutritional science is that it's complex, therefore it is neigh impossi…

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

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

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

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

Re: Oatly: The New Coke?

#182

Post by bitexploder » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 1:06 PM UTC

xfiz wrote: post #152

The author should write a similar article about himself, because the whole article is filled with dubious claims and misguided evidence. The two main claims are "Since the GI is a measure of how much of a negative response your body has to certain sugars" and "research showing harms from canola oil". Neither can be ascertained. A big problem with nutritional science is that it's complex, therefore it is neigh impossi…

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

Re: Oatly: The New Coke?

#183

Post by dsabanin » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 1:06 PM UTC

flyinglizard wrote: post #88

nnp7000 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Oatly: The New Coke?

#184

Post by partyboat1586 » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 1:09 PM UTC

balfirevic wrote: post #159

partyboat1586 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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.

Re: Oatly: The New Coke?

#185

Post by dna_polymerase » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 1:09 PM UTC

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

Re: Oatly: The New Coke?

#186

Post by bitexploder » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 1:10 PM UTC

cribbles wrote: post #145

I'm sympathetic to marketing counterfactuals, so I wanted to like this article, but its claims did not sway me. - The appalling environmental footprint of the dairy industry was never addressed. - The canola oil claims cited were nowhere near conclusive (see twanvl and NotOscarWilde's comments below). - The nutritional comparison seemed to me to be more or less trivial. Okay, it's got a higher glycemic index and simi…

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

Re: Oatly: The New Coke?

#187

Post by bitexploder » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 1:13 PM UTC

lambdaba wrote: post #119

vanilla-almond wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

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.

Give avocado oil a shot. Great smoke point, no real flavor. I am allergic to avacado somehow and the oil doesn’t bother me.

Re: Oatly: The New Coke?

#188

Post by partyboat1586 » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 1:13 PM UTC

uxcolumbo wrote: post #172

partyboat1586 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You might want to have a look at this: Health Concerns About Dairy - by Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine https://www.pcrm.org/good-nutrition/nutrition-information/he...

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.

Re: Oatly: The New Coke?

#189

Post by NotGargarin » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 1:16 PM UTC

flyinglizard wrote: post #58

crispyporkbites wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people have some level of lactose malabsorption. Also cows milk has pretty grave health implications for the cows

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…

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].

[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

Re: Oatly: The New Coke?

#190

Post by seanwilson » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 1:17 PM UTC

toohotatopic wrote: post #171

seanwilson wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 crue…

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 livin…

> 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.