Oatly: The New Coke?

For completeness, I checked them all and the score is:

* Rat

* Rat

* actually about cooking _in_ canola oil

* about switching _any_ vegetable oil to _less_ olive oil

* Rat

* actually about a different oil with quite different content of the active acid being trialled

* Rat

* Rat

(Oh, and the article is written by a SEO marketer)

> Oatly compares their sugar to the sugar in cow’s milk, but they’re not the same sugar. Lactose, the sugar in cow’s milk, has a GI of 46. Since the GI is a measure of how much of a negative response your body has to certain sugars, the 7g of sugar in Oatly with its 100+ GI is actually potentially worse than the 12g of sugar in whole milk with a 46 GI. We can use something called the “glycemic load” to measure this, which gives us a GL for the sugar in 8oz of Oatly of 7.35, and a GL for the sugar in 8oz of whole milk of 5.52.

The "glycemic load" is just the result of the multiplication of the sugar mass by the glycemic index: 7x1.05=7.35 and 12x0.46=5.52; it would be more clear to simply state that.

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 similar sugar content compared to cow milk. If you share the author's concern about tacitly "health-adjacent" marketing, this is problematic, but not an outright lie. At worst the product has a pretty comparable nutritional portfolio to cow milk. Seems appropriate for a "milk substitute," no?

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?

- Most glaringly, the moral dimension of dairy consumption is never addressed. I won't harp on about this too much as many other commenters have already, but this seemed like a glaring omission: who cares about sugar content if the alternative is needless suffering? I guess you could have the best of both worlds by not drinking a milk substitute in the first place, but that's not Oatly's market segment, so...

Overall, this article came away as basically validating Oatly's marketing claims to me. Which is frustrating, since as I stated above, I'm biased toward marketing scrutiny!

The brand of soy milk popular for coffee etc. in Australia is Bonsoy (japanese brand), and it's worth giving a try. They did poison people a few years back, but that's a price worth paying for good tasting soy, right? In my travels I've found that most soy milk consumed around the world is pretty awful. I don't know why. There's a lot more variance in its taste than with most other cow's milk substitutes.

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.