I'd just like a comforting confirmation that "big milk" (sorry) hasn't had anything to do with this article.
Apologies, got a bit traumatized by documentaries "Bananas" and "big boys gone bananas".
Oatly: The New Coke?
241–250 of 429 posts
Re: Oatly: The New Coke?
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 crue…
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.
Re: Oatly: The New Coke?
#243A tangent on Canola and rapeseed oil: 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 eru…
What health risks do you imagine might exist?
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...
Re: Oatly: The New Coke?
#244A tangent on Canola and rapeseed oil: 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 eru…
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.
Re: Oatly: The New Coke?
#245This article convinced me to give Parly a try. Been looking for a milk substitute that is closer to Coe milk than nut milks.
Re: Oatly: The New Coke?
#246I'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…
There are other brands with no canola, or any oil added.
My favourite in the uk is "innocent".
But I think if you're going to get wound up about canola oil, there are bigger targets than milk substitutes.
Re: Oatly: The New Coke?
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
At least where I'm from in the US, there is no "bulk goods aisle" in the grocery. It makes it a hell of a lot harder to eat healthy because we have no alternatives to canned and packaged goods in many categories of foods.
Re: Oatly: The New Coke?
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The author engages in a little deceptive rhetoric himself by setting a 12oz serving as the baseline. It's true that a portion that size is bad for you. Lattes are bad for you. Like many people, though, I only rarely use milk substitutes to add a dash of not-coffee to coffee that would otherwise be too hot or too burnt. Guess I shouldn't be concerned? Maybe you shouldn't be, but others might. I was regularly using ~…
There’s also Elmhurst - though more expensive. It’s basically just water and oats and maybe some salt. They list the number of ingredients on the label though for easy selection as some have more.
According to the article, the maltose in Oatly is a product of the breakdown of the oats. Would it be listed as an ingredient?
Re: Oatly: The New Coke?
#249Earlier 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…
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.
Re: Oatly: The New Coke?
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
That’s a bunk argument. 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 diversifie…
There’s no HFCS in Oatly.
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.