Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Oatly: The New Coke?

divinations.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 429 posts

Re: Oatly: The New Coke?

#211

Post by roebk »

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…

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.

Re: Oatly: The New Coke?

#212

Post by uxcolumbo »

partyboat1586 wrote: post #188
uxcolumbo wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not an advertisement, it's listed in the further reading section.

And have you read the book?

But hey, I guess you know better than 12,000 physicians.

Re: Oatly: The New Coke?

#214

Post by mark_l_watson »

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

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

Goodbye oat milk!

Re: Oatly: The New Coke?

#215

Post by formerly_proven »

Asooka wrote: post #198
vanilla-almond wrote: post #150

I drink milk, but I think the strongest case against drinking cows milk is industrial-scale dairy farming. We (consumers) are to blame because we want milk as cheap as possible. We've seen protests across Europe in the past by farmers who say they can't provide milk at such cheap prices and maintain welfare standards. Unfortunately, we consumers seem unwilling to pay for high welfare. Sure we say otherwise when asked…

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

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

Re: Oatly: The New Coke?

#216

Post by lapinot »

Asooka wrote: post #196
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…

The claim is that Oatly is not a good substitute for milk, and that cow milk is perfectly fine to drink for a good percentage of people, which I judge the article demonstrated satisfactorily. You can of course say you don't want to (or can't) drink milk for a very long list of absolutely fine reasons. The solution then is to just not drink milk, not substitute it with oat-canola slurry. Or you could reduce your consu…

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

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

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

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

Re: Oatly: The New Coke?

#217

Post by tashoecraft »

Asooka wrote: post #196
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…

The claim is that Oatly is not a good substitute for milk, and that cow milk is perfectly fine to drink for a good percentage of people, which I judge the article demonstrated satisfactorily. You can of course say you don't want to (or can't) drink milk for a very long list of absolutely fine reasons. The solution then is to just not drink milk, not substitute it with oat-canola slurry. Or you could reduce your consu…

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

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

Re: Oatly: The New Coke?

#218

Post by partyboat1586 »

balfirevic wrote: post #200
partyboat1586 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks for the answer! 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?

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.

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!

Re: Oatly: The New Coke?

#219

Post by mumblemumble »

rguzman wrote: post #181
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…

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

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

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

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

Re: Oatly: The New Coke?

#220

Post by luckman212 »

lambdaba wrote: post #205
Jolter wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Quoting this study https://actascientific.com/ASNH/pdf/ASNH-02-0083.pdf (note: I get an error opening the PDF) > 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 swi…

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.
Post reply on HN