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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

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!

ysavir 6y ago
> 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 ~1 cup of Oatly (8 ounces) in my weekend pancakes. It's still only 2/3 of their baseline portion, but it's significant enough. I've already moved from Oatly to Califia Farms Oat Barista Blend, which only has 3 grams of sugar per cup to Oatly's 7. And I'm keeping my eyes open for alternatives with even less sugar.
- ianai 6y ago
  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.
  - Forbo 6y ago
    I've been making my own oat milk on occasion. I just got some 80 micron nut milk bags (at least two, I double strain) and use the recipe found here: https://minimalistbaker.com/make-oat-milk/ https://minimalistbaker.com/make-oat-milk/ The hardest part is figuring out just how long you need to blend it for. It took me three batches to get it just right. The first was too thin (didn't blend long enough), the second too slimy (blended too long). It's dirt cheap and gets the job done. Give it a good shake before you use it, though, as it has a tendency to settle.
    - ysavir 6y ago
      This is fantastic and I'll be giving a try. Do you think the recipe/process works fine if I scale it down to a 1-cup yield?
      - Forbo 6y ago
        I honestly couldn't say, I've only made the batch listed in the link. It tends to keep pretty well, so I usually just make a jug of it and use it over the course of a few weeks. The cleanup can be a little cumbersome, so I'd rather do it in bulk and spend less time on the cleanup.
    - azinman2 6y ago
      If it settles, do you get a consistent texture when drinking it? Ever tried to foam it for a latte?
      - Forbo 6y ago
        It takes a while for it to separate. I haven't passed it through our steam frother yet, I'll have to give that a run.
ianai 6y ago
For all the talk about fat content and quality, the topic of hormones in milk should be discussed. Cows load their milk up with hormones to stimulate growth in their calves. We’re not calves and don’t need stimulating. Further, modern dairy farms pump hormones into cows to induce higher milk production-thus more hormones make it into the milk in the container. There are even morphine-like compounds in milk and dairy products. They’re even more concentrated in cheeses. These same morphine compounds can be concentrated and given from a human mother to her baby through breast milk in non-trivial doses (though the conditions hopefully make this rare). Then there’s just the negatives of having additional cholesterol through the diet. None of that’s going to be in plant milks. Ref “your body in balance” by Barnard.
- gridlockd 6y ago
  > Ref “your body in balance” by Barnard A vegan neurologist might be a bit biased... What does he have to say about plant-based hormones such as phytoestrogens? Also, what is wrong with a little bit of morphine in your food?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - Integrape 6y ago
    I for one always reach for a piece of cheese when I've had a stressful day, it really takes the edge off.
    - short_sells_poo 6y ago
      Do you cut it with pastry?
    - dexterdog 6y ago
      Bourbon and a nice dry cheddar are my goto when I need a serious unwind.
    - BenjiWiebe 6y ago
bitexploder 6y ago
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.
- devmunchies 6y ago
  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.
  - roywiggins 6y ago
    There's toxins in all air, but we don't hold our breath until we need to breathe...
    - knowmad 6y ago
      I mean we kind of do. If everyone breathed like they ate(in the US) there would be people fainting all over the place.
  - bitexploder 6y ago
    Another note: there is no such thing as “toxins” in food. Barring things like heavy metals, and actual poison. You won’t see any research about nutrition and food talk about “toxins” in a context like this.
- tlow 6y ago
  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=%2Fdrinks%2Fhot-coffees%2Flattes https://www.starbucks.com/menu/product/414/hot?parent=%2Fdri...
  - 6y ago
Asooka 6y ago
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 consumption to the point where its price can go up (as more of a luxury product) and allow manufacturers to treat animals ethically. Or buy it from responsible farms. You can also make the point here that there is a great number of people who, when faced with the choice of "drink less milk" vs "continue cow abuse", will pick the latter because they like drinking milk more than they care about cows (which are bred specifically for human consumption). In that case you could argue that substituting Oatly for milk will make the world better, because it lets them lower their milk consumption without requiring sacrifice on their part. The thing that worries me here are second order effects - if Oatly is indeed not very healthy (which it sounds like it isn't, at least compared to regular milk), then these people will then suffer lowered cognition and worse health, leading to them making less than ideal choices in democratic elections, and putting more strain on the health system. Again - there are good critiques that can be leveraged against our current farming practices regarding milk production and more, but I don't see the solution being switching to synthetic alternatives with potentially harmful effects that marketing makes their best to prevent you from knowing. Just go without and advocate for change.
- lapinot 6y ago
  > 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).
ejolto 6y ago
> 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 coffee at a time he's not drinking coffee, but really drinking milk with a splash of coffee.
- d0ugal 6y ago
  I would guess they are using this comparison as oatly has become popular in coffee shops for lates etc. So the size is more common there, but probably not common at home.
- goatinaboat 6y ago
  really drinking milk with a splash of coffee Lots of people do this. It's called a latte. Or for hipsters, a "flat white". Or any mocha-frappa-chino equivalent has a lot of milk and cream in it.
  - grumple 6y ago
    12 oz of milk though? My research says a latte contains about 6oz. Fraps probably contain less (mostly ice).
    - goatinaboat 6y ago
      They come in a bucket if you go to Starbucks
      - neeleshs 6y ago
        There is also a "short" version, but you have to explicitly ask for it. It's not on the standard size menu
    - defen 6y ago
tlow 6y ago
False. > At worst the product has a pretty comparable nutritional portfolio to cow milk FTA: "Of all the different kinds of sugars you can eat, maltose has the highest glycemic index, with a rating of 105 out of 100. "Lactose, the sugar in cow’s milk, has a GI of 46." It is incorrect to call 105 and 46 "comparable".
- capitalsigma 6y ago
  "High GI == bad" also seems like an oversimplification. A snicker's bar has a GI of 43: http://www.glycemicindex.com/foodSearch.php?num=1774&ak=detail http://www.glycemicindex.com/foodSearch.php?num=1774&ak=deta....
betenoire 6y ago
The article was about the marketing methods, comparing them to Coke from before. It wasn't about oats vs milk, per se

ysavir 6y ago

> 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 ~1 cup of Oatly (8 ounces) in my weekend pancakes. It's still only 2/3 of their baseline portion, but it's significant enough. I've already moved from Oatly to Califia Farms Oat Barista Blend, which only has 3 grams of sugar per cup to Oatly's 7. And I'm keeping my eyes open for alternatives with even less sugar.

ianai 6y ago
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.
- Forbo 6y ago
  I've been making my own oat milk on occasion. I just got some 80 micron nut milk bags (at least two, I double strain) and use the recipe found here: https://minimalistbaker.com/make-oat-milk/ https://minimalistbaker.com/make-oat-milk/ The hardest part is figuring out just how long you need to blend it for. It took me three batches to get it just right. The first was too thin (didn't blend long enough), the second too slimy (blended too long). It's dirt cheap and gets the job done. Give it a good shake before you use it, though, as it has a tendency to settle.
  - ysavir 6y ago
    This is fantastic and I'll be giving a try. Do you think the recipe/process works fine if I scale it down to a 1-cup yield?
    - Forbo 6y ago
      I honestly couldn't say, I've only made the batch listed in the link. It tends to keep pretty well, so I usually just make a jug of it and use it over the course of a few weeks. The cleanup can be a little cumbersome, so I'd rather do it in bulk and spend less time on the cleanup.
  - azinman2 6y ago
    If it settles, do you get a consistent texture when drinking it? Ever tried to foam it for a latte?
    - Forbo 6y ago
      It takes a while for it to separate. I haven't passed it through our steam frother yet, I'll have to give that a run.

ianai 6y ago

For all the talk about fat content and quality, the topic of hormones in milk should be discussed. Cows load their milk up with hormones to stimulate growth in their calves. We’re not calves and don’t need stimulating. Further, modern dairy farms pump hormones into cows to induce higher milk production-thus more hormones make it into the milk in the container. There are even morphine-like compounds in milk and dairy products. They’re even more concentrated in cheeses. These same morphine compounds can be concentrated and given from a human mother to her baby through breast milk in non-trivial doses (though the conditions hopefully make this rare). Then there’s just the negatives of having additional cholesterol through the diet. None of that’s going to be in plant milks. Ref “your body in balance” by Barnard.

gridlockd 6y ago
> Ref “your body in balance” by Barnard A vegan neurologist might be a bit biased... What does he have to say about plant-based hormones such as phytoestrogens? Also, what is wrong with a little bit of morphine in your food?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Integrape 6y ago
  I for one always reach for a piece of cheese when I've had a stressful day, it really takes the edge off.
  - short_sells_poo 6y ago
    Do you cut it with pastry?
  - dexterdog 6y ago
    Bourbon and a nice dry cheddar are my goto when I need a serious unwind.
  - BenjiWiebe 6y ago

bitexploder 6y ago

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.

devmunchies 6y ago
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.
- roywiggins 6y ago
  There's toxins in all air, but we don't hold our breath until we need to breathe...
  - knowmad 6y ago
    I mean we kind of do. If everyone breathed like they ate(in the US) there would be people fainting all over the place.
- bitexploder 6y ago
  Another note: there is no such thing as “toxins” in food. Barring things like heavy metals, and actual poison. You won’t see any research about nutrition and food talk about “toxins” in a context like this.
tlow 6y ago
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=%2Fdrinks%2Fhot-coffees%2Flattes https://www.starbucks.com/menu/product/414/hot?parent=%2Fdri...
- 6y ago

Asooka 6y ago

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 consumption to the point where its price can go up (as more of a luxury product) and allow manufacturers to treat animals ethically. Or buy it from responsible farms. You can also make the point here that there is a great number of people who, when faced with the choice of "drink less milk" vs "continue cow abuse", will pick the latter because they like drinking milk more than they care about cows (which are bred specifically for human consumption). In that case you could argue that substituting Oatly for milk will make the world better, because it lets them lower their milk consumption without requiring sacrifice on their part. The thing that worries me here are second order effects - if Oatly is indeed not very healthy (which it sounds like it isn't, at least compared to regular milk), then these people will then suffer lowered cognition and worse health, leading to them making less than ideal choices in democratic elections, and putting more strain on the health system. Again - there are good critiques that can be leveraged against our current farming practices regarding milk production and more, but I don't see the solution being switching to synthetic alternatives with potentially harmful effects that marketing makes their best to prevent you from knowing. Just go without and advocate for change.

lapinot 6y ago
> 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).

ejolto 6y ago

> 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 coffee at a time he's not drinking coffee, but really drinking milk with a splash of coffee.

d0ugal 6y ago
I would guess they are using this comparison as oatly has become popular in coffee shops for lates etc. So the size is more common there, but probably not common at home.
goatinaboat 6y ago
really drinking milk with a splash of coffee Lots of people do this. It's called a latte. Or for hipsters, a "flat white". Or any mocha-frappa-chino equivalent has a lot of milk and cream in it.
- grumple 6y ago
  12 oz of milk though? My research says a latte contains about 6oz. Fraps probably contain less (mostly ice).
  - goatinaboat 6y ago
    They come in a bucket if you go to Starbucks
    - neeleshs 6y ago
      There is also a "short" version, but you have to explicitly ask for it. It's not on the standard size menu
  - defen 6y ago

tlow 6y ago

False. > At worst the product has a pretty comparable nutritional portfolio to cow milk FTA: "Of all the different kinds of sugars you can eat, maltose has the highest glycemic index, with a rating of 105 out of 100. "Lactose, the sugar in cow’s milk, has a GI of 46." It is incorrect to call 105 and 46 "comparable".

capitalsigma 6y ago
"High GI == bad" also seems like an oversimplification. A snicker's bar has a GI of 43: http://www.glycemicindex.com/foodSearch.php?num=1774&ak=detail http://www.glycemicindex.com/foodSearch.php?num=1774&ak=deta....

betenoire 6y ago

The article was about the marketing methods, comparing them to Coke from before. It wasn't about oats vs milk, per se