The Vegan Thread

I don't know much about nutrition, so can't comment on the article, but I tried Oatly (not the famous 'barista' mix) once and didn't like it. It was probably my least favourite plant drink that I've tried (and I almost never use any others, only occasionally use soya drink in cooking when a recipe calls for it). It would certainly make sense that it's so popular because its sugar content is so high (and that the marketing works and investors have been getting involved partly because of that), but I have no idea one way or the other. As a nutritional ignoramus, the article didn't convince me that Oatly is worse nutritionally than dairy milk, just that there may be a certain logic that to achieve certain properties that people crave ('mouth feel', which I guess probably isn't important to me, and which may be one of the reasons why people insist on continuing to eat meat; 'mouth feel' may be a different thing from finer aspects of taste, e.g. the taste of spices, although of course everybody experiences both to some extent), you are quite likely to end up with things like a certain amount of sugar(s).

I do think the plant 'milk' movement is still in its infancy, despite Plamil having started (six?) decades ago, and that the products will become more refined and with more interesting properties over time. At the moment, they're not something I use much.

Lest we forget, veganism is currently popular mainly on the back of vegan junk food becoming not-quite-but-increasingly ubiquitous. The world is (and has been for a long time) very deep in the hole of a craving/financial need people have for rubbish food.

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. Oatly’s glycemic load is about 33% higher than milk’s is!

This is a bit of a dubious paragraph. GI is not a measure how much of a negative response your body has to sugar. It is simply how quickly carbohydrate turns into energy, as far as I understand.

Comparisons to coke are also a bit far-fetched. Like, people who get obese from drinking fizzy drinks are probably drinking a whole lot more fizzy drinks than the average oat milk consumer is drinking oat milk. No one is sitting and drinking 2 litres of oat milk while watching TV.

Well, he’s a marketing guy. Why does he get to have a say on nutrition? I would discard him based on that alone.

Also:

“It’s also hard to find compelling research suggesting milk is bad for you”

which seem strange given that he can list several links on canola oil. Obviously he is not a PubMed kind of guy.

Yes Oatly is a processed food, but carbohydrates don’t cause diabetes and you don’t get all the sex hormones from oatly that you get from cows milk, nor the saturated fat.

Ideally you should only drink water, but between cows milk and plant based milk, plant based milk always wins from a health perspective.