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

301–310 of 429 posts

Re: Oatly: The New Coke?

#301

Post by Tagbert »

tlow wrote: post #283
bitexploder wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

False. Lattes ARE most definitely bad for you when they contain 30-40 grams of sugar or almost 3 TABLESPOONS.[1] [1] https://www.starbucks.com/menu/product/414/hot?parent=%2Fdri...

You picked a dessert drink.

An actual Latte has less than half the number of carbs as that https://www.starbucks.com/menu/product/407/hot?parent=%2Fdri...

Re: Oatly: The New Coke?

#302

Post by knowmad »

roywiggins wrote: post #271
devmunchies wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have it backwards. No food is inherently “good” for you. Most people are better off skipping meals until they absolutely need nutrients. There’s toxins in all food.

There's toxins in all air, but we don't hold our breath until we need to breathe...

I mean we kind of do. If everyone breathed like they ate(in the US) there would be people fainting all over the place.

Re: Oatly: The New Coke?

#303

Post by crispyporkbites »

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?

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?

Re: Oatly: The New Coke?

#304

Post by eyko »

317070 wrote: post #266
ejolto wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The author engages in a little deceptive rhetoric himself by setting a 12oz serving as the baseline. Yeah what is up with that? 12 oz is over 340 ml, who puts that much milk in their coffee? I had to measure the volume of my coffee cup, it's 250 ml or 8.8 oz. I usually drink my coffee black, but if I do have milk in it it is usually a tenth of what the author uses. Unless the author is drinking a quarter gallon of…

As a non-coffee drinker, I drink my oatly pure, in the same way as I drank my milk growing up. So yeah, 340 ml is apt when I use my big mug. You make it sound as if no-one drinks pure milk in your environment? I find THAT weird.

I've never seen an adult drink pure milk, other than in some movies. I guess it's an american thing? Any Europeans here who drink pints of milk care to comment?

Re: Oatly: The New Coke?

#305

Post by mumblemumble »

CPLX wrote: post #222
mumblemumble wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 basi…

> 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. Yes and no. There is some element of an inherent scientific method involved in having cultures eat various foods for tens of thousands of years and then seeing which ones are still around at the end of the “experiment”

Perhaps there's some effect there, but this idea that more competitively successful cultures have healthier diets is difficult to reconcile with a lot of other memes around health food.

One also has to reckon with the fact that people's health needs were very different a couple hundred years ago. Once upon a time, the greatest health concern was getting enough nutrition. Also, when your life expectancy is 30, you probably don't give a damn that, if by some chance you live to see 70, all those preserved foods you used to get through the winter will end up having increased the chance that the thing that eventually kills you is stomach cancer.

As TFA's hand-wringing about sugar clearly indicates, though, we're just not playing the same game our ancestors did. The major worry nowadays that it is now, uniquely in history, possible for almost anyone's primary health concern to be that they're getting too much of a good thing.

Re: Oatly: The New Coke?

#306

Post by GordonS »

bitexploder wrote: post #182
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.

It's true that if you eat fat, protein and fibre alongside sugars, the effective GI of the sugars is reduced.

But I really don't think see how that makes measurements of individual foods misleading. How is it any different than individual foods being labelled with calorie counts and macro-nutrient figures?

Edit: I think the article uses the high GI of a sugar ingredient to claim that Oatly is bad - yes, this is misleading; the GI of the whole product is what matters.

Re: Oatly: The New Coke?

#307

Post by preben »

eyko wrote: post #304
317070 wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a non-coffee drinker, I drink my oatly pure, in the same way as I drank my milk growing up. So yeah, 340 ml is apt when I use my big mug. You make it sound as if no-one drinks pure milk in your environment? I find THAT weird.

I've never seen an adult drink pure milk, other than in some movies. I guess it's an american thing? Any Europeans here who drink pints of milk care to comment?

Sweden here. Pints might be an exaggeration, but definitely a staple in my fridge.

Re: Oatly: The New Coke?

#308

Post by [deleted] »

eyko wrote: post #304
317070 wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a non-coffee drinker, I drink my oatly pure, in the same way as I drank my milk growing up. So yeah, 340 ml is apt when I use my big mug. You make it sound as if no-one drinks pure milk in your environment? I find THAT weird.

I've never seen an adult drink pure milk, other than in some movies. I guess it's an american thing? Any Europeans here who drink pints of milk care to comment?

[deleted]

Re: Oatly: The New Coke?

#309

Post by kritiko »

ysavir wrote: post #166
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 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 ~…

The author would say that you shouldn’t be eating pancakes, which presumably you are making with refined grains and frying in oil, and likely topping with some sort of sugar... he’s a keto fan. If you’re going to eat pancakes, I’d say it’s worth making them taste good.

Re: Oatly: The New Coke?

#310

Post by dnissley »

mcguire wrote: post #248
ianai wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It is not listed. I found out by googling around after noticing that there was added sugar listed in the nutrition facts but no sugar of any kind listed in the ingredients.
Post reply on HN