Oatly: The New Coke?

There is a simple rule I follow which I, probably erroneously, call the Law of Nature. If you want to trust what goes in, make it yourself and make it with whole foods that you can see and touch. Why is a food refined? To make it easier to preserve, store, and transport or to modify it's consistency, taste, or nutritional characteristics. 99% of these refinements lead to a product which is less nutritious for you and likely bad for you in some way. Indulge occasionally but realize that most forms of modern food refinement is not natural, and our bodies have evolved over tens of thousands of years to efficiently consume what occurs in nature. If you need a lab or the bacteria doesn't seem to manifest magically, it doesn't meet my definition of natural.

I know this basically sounds like a Paleo plug, but my purpose isn't to define a practice you should follow. My main problem is information and deception. I don't have time to vet an entire grocery store of products, so I trust my evolution as a default. I want to feel comfortable and confident about what I consume rather than building an ideology out of it.

But we didn't have the internet yet, so how do you fact check it? The TV said so.

I do see fewer people interested in milk as you go younger here, I think that once it was more broadly understood that milk is marginal the pressure to drink it was gone but there was still some cultural kind of urban legend nonsense that is really hard to get rid of in a society that doesn't trust experts. Which I can't blame anyone for if we're talking about nutritional experts because anyone alive for more than twenty years has seen them flip their opinion on at least a quarter of food types.

It is notable that in that part of my family, half the kids ended up lactose intolerant and still are frustrated about their parents for making them sick all the time as kids by requiring them to drink something they didn't want to drink anyway.

I liked chocolate milk because who doesn't, but after someone for the first time pointed out that it's kinda weird for humans to drink milk intended for calves (maybe I was 13 or 14?) I pretty much just stopped drinking it because it just wasn't that good anyway and now I had an excuse. My brother and mother are both lactose intolerant, it turns out.

I think a lot of people have felt low grade sick their entire lives in the US because they've never gone for long enough without dairy to notice.

Whole piece similarly strikes me as dishonest and agenda-driven.

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.