I'm not vegan or anything, but I've found oat milk not only tastes great on cereal etc, but it also keeps fresh for much longer in the fridge. I've pretty much given up buying cow's milk now days, unless I have a specific recipe or something that calls for it. Cheese, on the other hand, I can't see myself giving up any time soon!
Same - not veggie but switched to oat milk (despite not liking it much at first) and now strongly prefer the taste, texture, and all of the other benefits like fridge longevity, lack of smell if I leave a thermos with a latte for a few days, etc.
When it comes to Oatly... It tastes good, but that's because it contains plenty of sugars. You'll notice the difference when you make your own oat milk from oats. It's tastes quite terrible actually.
Oatly adds enzymes to break down the starches to sugar.
So does cow milk. 7g* of added sugar in a cup of Oatly, about 8g of various sugars in a cup of milk. Oatly add the sugar to more closely simulate the flavour of milk, but it tastes about as sweet... and both are way too sweet if you ask me.
*The nutrition profile is a bit more complicated as I think they add enzymes to break down starches in the oats, so you end up with more sugar even though it's not technically "added".
Oatly's primary sugar, maltose, has 2.3 times the blood sugar impact as lactose, the primary sugar in cow's milk. Maltose has a glycemic index of 105, compared to 46 for lactose.[1]
Oatly (and most other oat milks) do NOT "add" any sugar! The sugar in oat milk comes from the starch naturally present in the oats, which is broken down into sugars by amylase enzymes during the production process.
(AFAIK the "added sugars" wording on US Oatly labels is due to a technicality of US labelling laws. It's doesn't say that on European labels.)
> "When it comes to Oatly... It tastes good, but that's because it contains plenty of sugars."
Absolutely, but that's also true of cows milk. The sugars in oat milk are a bit simpler (primarily maltose rather than lactose), which gives a lower glycemic index, but the total sugar content isn't much different.
Either way, if you compare them to something like fruit juice or full-sugar soft drinks, the sugar content is still pretty low.
Even with the slightly lower glycemic index for maltose due to the soluble fiber content, I get more or less the same result for Oatly’s blood sugar impact: a glycemic index of 77 (previously 79) and a glycemic load of 18.4 (previously 19.0) for a 12 oz portion; still about the same blood sugar impact as a 12 oz cola, which has a glycemic index of 63 and glycemic load of 20.8.
Oatly original has 7g of sugar - 1 cup of whole cows milk has 12 g of sugar. So it is still significantly less sugar than cow's milk. I drink planet oat milk, and that only has 4g of sugar and tastes good to me.
Oatly's primary sugar, maltose, has 2.3 times the blood sugar impact as lactose, the primary sugar in cow's milk. Maltose has a glycemic index of 105, compared to 46 for lactose.[1]
Ok, but if Oatly is 100% maltose, it has only a slightly higher glycemic index than cow's milk. But the aforementioned planet oat is still lower(assuming it is 100% maltose)
I double-checked the amount of sugar in milk and in my area, Netherlands, all milk (whole or not) contains less than 5g of sugar per 100g. While Oatly has indeed about 7g per 100g. So it's quite the opposite, oatly has significantly more sugar with higher glycemic index.
The US nutrition label lists sugars per serving, which is 240ml. So according to the US rules it's 7g sugar per 240ml, not per 100g (or 100ml).
The US Oatly label lists "Total Carbohydrate 16 g, Includes 7 g added sugars" per 240ml.
The UK Oatly label lists "Carbohydrate: 6.6 g, of which sugars: 4.0 g" per 100ml. Pretty sure the Netherlands product and label is the same as the UK one.
Is that not a good thing? Starches break down into sugars in the body anyway and presumably have similar deleterious effects on the liver. May as well enjoy tasting them.
It is not, timing matters. It takes some time for starches to break into sugar therefore the release of sugars is not spiking. Glycemic index was created to show a difference between good and bad carbs.
Yes, longer fridge life is a nice benefit. I have some heavy cream for baking, but use soy milk fine in most sweet recipes.
There's more variation in alternative milks, even within one type, than cow milk. We're mostly soymilk (bean milk, the kids call it), but it took a little while to find one that didn't feel chalky or weird. Happily it's the store brand that's $2 a half gallon. Settled on soy creamer, which is not as thick as dairy creamer but next best thing among non-dairy that tastes good.
With you on cheese! It's what makes plant burgers taste good.
Milk alternatives don't have any benefits in children. Milk drinking in children is thought to induce growth. You can't overdo it though as it interferes with iron absorption.
If we go purely on factors contributing to obesity, plant milks may not necessarily be better. Many plant milks are carb heavy with not much in the way of fat or protein, so it won’t make you feel as full as milk.
I'm not a milk or milk alternative drinker but when I've looked at things like Oatly they seem to have at least as many calories and sugar as something like skim milk.
At least the oat milk brand I like to drink (Alpro) has exactly the same amount of calories as normal cow milk, which makes kinda sense, as they use additional oil to get to the identical fat content :D
So replacing it will not change anything in that regard, we just must be aware that (any) milk is (liquid) food and not a drink. Same problem as with softdrinks or fruit juices.
Anecdata: I regularly drank (cow) milk as a child and now I'm over 2 meters in height. But of course correlation with n=1 is not causation, and I'm sure many people here are equally large without a drop of milk. :D
Milk should be the beverage of choice for growing kids who do not have contraindications. 3.25% milk is recommended up until 2 years of age, and to continue into older age if there are no issues with obesity.
I have my doubts about such recommendations; aside from the influence of the dairy lobby, how many such nutrition guidelines account for high-quality non-dairy alternative sources of protein and calcium?
The only dairy alternative that has comparable protein quality (DIAAS) is soy, and AFAIK there aren't many studies of soy milk given to toddlers/small kids.
Consumption of a mostly soy diet by small children is undesirable because of the presence of phytoestrogens in soy.
Pulses would come close second as a protein source, but a child would have to consistently eat larger servings in order to keep up with other meat-eating-and-milk-drinking children. Large portions are not always realistic in ensuring adequate protein intake in kids, who will occasionally go through phases of fussy eating.
Adopting vegetarian or vegan habits is great when periods of significant growth stop (and maybe this is what humans are meant to do, rather than to keep eating animal products in adulthood).
However, from my own experience, meat and milk is a necessity for avoiding malnourishment in little humans undergoing development.
I drink a ton of milk, maybe a third of a gallon a day. Always thought the obsession with counting calories was a little misplaced. It always seems to be very fit people drinking a ton of milk. People think that junk like Special K is healthy and great stuff like butter, eggs, and milk is bad for you. Tell that to French people who live to 120.
As I understand, the reason why children are encouraged to drink milk is mostly about calcium. Many milk alternatives now have the same or more calcium per litre as cow's milk. When you say "growth" is this about bone (calcium) or muscle (protein) growth? In my experience, protein per litre is generally lower for milk alternatives.
Meanwhile 100 million oil barrels are extracted (each producing 0.5/0.7 ton of CO2 equivalent), 23 millions of tons of coal, and 365 thousand million of cubic feet of natural gas are consumed. All those numbers each day, and without counting leaks.
And we are talking of fossil fuels, carbon that wasn't in the ecosystem for maybe many millions of years, compared with the relatively short lived and recycled methane that emits living things. There is a big elephant in the room that nobody dare to talk about.
100% this. These dairy cows aren't magically unlocking some deeply seated fossil carbon and farting it into the atmosphere. Nature already has a carbon cycle that works in harmony between plants and animals, let's try and work with it and emulate it rather than use even more energy and other resources to produce these highly processed goods. If you are vegan go for it, if you care about the environment stick with milk made from cows which graze on open grass land.
2. "Stick with cows which graze on open grass land" - the amount of such cows is a tiny fraction of all cows. How will I know how to get to those cows?
I'm not even a vegan, but also hold no delusions about milk products.
Working with nature emulating it, as in biomimicry, something we so far seem to be terrible at as a human race.
I guess it's a very localised problem because just under 90% is grass fed in the UK. I can Google grass fed beef and get a lot of hits to indicate where I need to shop or I could ask the local butcher.
This is talked about literally daily. Unfortunately your message comes off as whataboutism in disguise. Let's focus on the fact that milk alternatives are good and cow farming is problematic in this thread.
If you eat meet which has been raised on ground where trees have been felled for the sole purpose of creating that meat then yes the amount of carbon released is going to be insane. Here in the UK (nearly?) all the meat we consume is grown nationally, i.e. doesn't originate from places like the Amazon.
And on the methane front, they eat the carbon in the grass which has literally just captured a bit of carbon from the atmosphere. They fart it up and then it comes back down in a reasonable period of time and goes back into the grass they are grazing upon.
The cycles and definitely complex and opaque but we need to get better at working with nature rather than engineering new ways to ignore the real issues.
The amount of resources, e.g. land, water etc. you need to raise cows is about 10 times more than what you'd need to grow the same calorie content of vegetables.
It actually doesn't matter if you grow the feed nationally or import from Amazon, the fact remains that those fields replace a natural ecosystem that could be contributing to biodiversity and much more efficient carbon capture.
Grass captures CO2 from the air, and the cows fart (actually mostly burp) out methane that is about 25 times worse GHG over a 100 year period.
You want to get better at working with nature? Hunt your own meat from the wilderness.
You're ignoring that cows are also carbon stores (and relatively dense ones as far as biodiversity goes).
Look, the problem is real simple. Simple math says that we can do this:
Carbon(in atomosphere) + Carbon(biomass) + Carbon(underground) = Carbon(total on earth)
Biomass gets it's carbon from atomosphere, and releases (most) of it back to atmosphere, and hence not a real problem as it undergoes a stable cycle and is limited by the total carbon between the two. Even if it's form changes, it's not a real problem as the math shows it's inherently limited. Additionally, some carbon does escape this cycle and ends back in underground stores - but it's an extremely slow process.
The real problem is taking carbon from underground, and putting it into the atmosphere - via an unnaturally rapid process. Anything else, is comically trivial to the problem that is the fossil fuel industry.
So by your logic we could just turn all forests to farmland and use it to raise cows without any noticeable impact on climate (or I guess environment in general)? And before you say you wouldn't turn ALL the forests to farmland, I'd like to point out that we've already done so to a massive amount of the planet. Forest coverage went from 60% of land area to just 30% in the last 70 years.
>So by your logic we could just turn all forests to farmland and use it to raise cows without any noticeable impact on climate (or I guess environment in general)?
That depends. If I take a forest which stores X amount of carbon, and replace it with farmland which has .1X the carbon. The remaining .9x carbon would have gone in the atmosphere. But now I can take that .1x carbon, put it into some cows, and grow another .1x on the farm, and now we're at .2x carbon (.1x in some cows + .1x in the plants on the farmland). I can do this and grow the population of cows, and eventually have a denser store of carbon than the forest alone originally had, but also eventually hit a sustainable limit.
But what I'm really saying is: focusing on stuff like this is not what we should be doing, as it's negligible and doesn't address the root of the problem. We need to look at the bigger picture. Which is: where is the problematic carbon ultimately coming from? Changing forests into farmland? Okay that can be easily changed in 100 or so years (and nature naturally does it for us). Burning a tank of gas in a few minutes? It takes millions of years for nature to reverse that... (not to mention that oil is an even denser store of carbon than trees).
I'm curious the long-term side effects on the body. I'm not sure it's better, we're something like 10,000 years into developing the ability to drink milk. I'm not sure we know what the effects of high soy intake is (only 10-15 years into mass consumer adoption -- we do see massive drops in sex hormones; possibly related, it is correlated).
Also, I really dislike how these studies are conducted. They often don't account for the fact _something_ will be produced on land and _something_ will be consuming it. There used to be millions of American Buffalo roaming the plains. I'm not sure relatively normal behavior is something to be concerned about.
The pollution IMO we should be concerned about are the chemicals in production of industry and food which are not natural. For instance, giant mono-crops of soy, which then go to factories where they are heavily processed, might be in-effect worse for the ecosystem as a whole. Another example is almond production. It takes far too much water to produce almonds and to make milk is insane.
I personally wouldn't be surprised if the soy, oat, almond industry are pushing these studies.
Actually we haven't evolved to digest milk after childhood that well:
While most infants can digest lactose, many people begin to develop lactose malabsorption—a reduced ability to digest lactose—after infancy. Experts estimate that about 68 percent of the world’s population has lactose malabsorption.1
Lactose malabsorption is more common in some parts of the world than in others. In Africa and Asia, most people have lactose malabsorption. In some regions, such as northern Europe, many people carry a gene that allows them to digest lactose after infancy, and lactose malabsorption is less common.1,2 In the United States, about 36 percent of people have lactose malabsorption.1
While lactose malabsorption causes lactose intolerance, not all people with lactose malabsorption have lactose intolerance.
Maybe "we" as in humanity haven't, but "we" as in white people from Northern Europe have. Even in the most lactose-malabsorptive place (Middle East), 3 out of 10 people can digest lactose successfully.
Soy milk is hundreds of years old. I haven't seen any evidence to suggest that the hormone drop is caused by soy milk. American bison digest far better than cows and don't produce methane. What is natural about millions of cows in factories producing milk? Additionally these cows are being fed enormous amounts of gmo monocrops in order to produce. Almond milk is indeed a wasteful product, but the misallocation of scarce water due to regulation is not the same thing as greenhouse gases.
Most soy is AFAIK used as food for farm animals. I wouldn't worry about it, many cultures were eating soy products since millennia and they were fine the whole time. Tofu is just solid soy milk.
Almond milk contains almost no almonds (and tastes horrible IMO, but YMMV, may also just be the brand I tried), I would assume that it's not that big of a chunk of the global almond production.
But in any case, oat milk should be safe, right? It's just a very watery porridge, isn't it? :D
Soy is not exactly a new thing in the history of humans. In fact some of the most populous regions on earth have been eating it widely for a very long time so it seems pretty low down on the list of fertility risk factors to be honest.
Soy milk hasn't been the favored alternative for a decade or more. Vegetable products are going to make more sense than adults breast-feeding from animals they don't even know.
I didn't see it discussed in the article, but I'm very excited about possibilities like Perfect Day [1]. They provide "animal-free" milk. Unlike other alternatives, this product contains actual milk proteins derived from microflora. So it has more of the texture, taste, and nutritional content you expect from milk, but animals are not involved in the manufacturing.
I'd love to see how animal-free protein products stack up against these other alternatives. I think including it in the comparison may do something to assuage the "but it's not milk, so..." objections.
Can't wait until such "real milk" replacements are broadly, cheapish-ly available, so we can get "real" vegan cheese, butter, cream and curd. IMO all current options there suck big time (but YMMV, of course) :D
Yeah I've tried a few and haven't found any to my liking. Other plant-based products like meat alternatives I've found to be OK, but dairy not so much.
Also if you read this Perfect Day, I don't eat much icecream but I'd buy vegan whey protein powder from y'all in a heartbeat.
This isn't really giving enough context. It's absolutely true that per volume, plant products are going to beat dairy handily in resource usage. But, they aren't remotely 1:1 products. Basically, almond milk is a good "per volume" replacement for low-fat milk products for applications like pouring on cereal or mixing in coffee. And... not much else.
The bulk of dairy production isn't for "milk" at all, it goes into derived products (mostly cheeses). And while there are a few plant based alternatives in that space, they aren't "oat milk" or whatever.
Basically, this article is doing the "paper straws" thing and addressing the wrong part of the problem. If you want to talk about dairy cow impact you need to get people off of ice cream and yogurt, not milk.
Thanks for pointing this out, I agree that the article should have mentioned this! I bet this varies widely from country to country too. (e.g. the French probably have a higher cheese-to-fluid ratio than other countries)
Even though it doesn't represent the majority of milk usage, maybe we shouldn't dismiss fluid milk entirely, since it's an easy first step.
As a lactose intolerant person personally I love the fact that there is now a wide proliferation of non-diary creamers that aren't gross french vanilla coffee mate stuff. I used to drink my coffee black because that stuff always made me feel sick. Now I can enjoy it with some almond or oat milk.
Lactose free milk, cream and many other dairy products are widely available.
I’m not lactose intolerant but I do buy lactofree milk I find it to last a bit longer and I see no reason to temp fate as you can become more and more intolerant as you grow older and I do like my cheeses.
"Milk" still means "cows milk" at every coffee shop I've been to, and I would be embarrassed to say "cows milk", as if I'm importing some internet culture war into the real world. Literally everyone will know what you mean if you say "with milk", unless you are at some specifically vegan coffee shop.
In NYC, and this is no longer true or assumed. I think oat milk is the most commonly used now. I have to say cow's milk pretty frequently just to get cow's milk, though I could probably get away with saying "regular milk."
Yes; "milk" with no qualifier is what comes out of the dangly bits of cows. If you order "eggs" at a restaurant, expect something that's been inside a chicken.
I'm not a vegan and I'm not lactose intolerant, but I'm 100% convinced that oat milk in coffee tastes much better than other options. It smoothes out the acidity and adds a mild nutty aroma. Almond milk and soy milk are good too, but oat is the best.
Cafe was out of cows milk one day, so i had oat milk instead. It was fine - it was different but I could get used to it. Prefer cow milk, but just because that's what im used to right now.
I'm not vegan but my teenage daughter is, and I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it's been to remove most dairy from my diet. I was extremely skeptical when it came to things like ice cream, but Ben and Jerry's has non-dairy versions of a bunch of their best flavors, and I now actually prefer them. When it comes to liquid milk alternatives, IMHO Califia original unsweetened almond milk is the tastiest option, but Oatly makes good stuff too.
I heard a convincing argument (tho citation needed, I guess) that veal meat is usually sourced from dairy cows' male offspring. And the idea of keeping dairy cows in a state of perpetual pregnancy is kind of off-putting too.
YMMV, but for my family, the health benefits, and animal welfare / humane farming concerns, and viable (tasty!) alternatives, were enough to make the switch an easy decision. Adding climate change impact and I feel even better about it.
You must consider other factors as well. The grass where cows are feeding is also a home and food for many other species. Making the land arable makes that void. Add pesticides, add other things to fight animals eating crops and the picture you get is just another extreme.
Not really. First, most beef isn't grass fed. By and large most cows are fed corn and soy, which means most of the land used producing beef already has those bad side effects. Second, if you grow food directly, you actually need less land to produce the same number of calories in plant material instead. So, you'd actually be able to creat more wild grassland without beef than with it.
Cows emit a lot of methane, and are in fact the single largest source of agricultural GHG emissions globally. As I understand it, there's a fair bit of research going into how to reduce emissions from cows, but it would also be good to reduce the number of cows if possible.
- Emmisions related to livestock are 5.8% of _all_ global CO2 and other GHG emissions [0]
- Methane leaks from Oil and gas drill sites and abandoned wells alone account for 5.8% of global emissions. [0]
Ethically I am aligned with animal welfare but rationally it is a lot more realistically that we force Oil&Gas to clean up their act than to expect everyone worldwide to switch to oat milk.
Between land that gets enough rain for intensive cultivation without draining aquifers and land that's a barren desert there's a wide range and you can still graze cows on most of it, though it takes more land per cow in drier areas.
I misparsed that as "American beef consumption is significantly reducing the commercial viability of an AMZN project named "Amazon Today," and was surprised when I clicked.
I guess it was a combination of us being on HN right now and the fact that I apparently downregulate how much signal I expect to get from English grammar rules when reading text written by strangers on the Internet. I certainly don't see any problems with your grammar upon re-reading.
I wonder if I would have correctly parsed "...published a big story on how American beef consumption is actively destroying the Amazon"?
And yet coffee shops that claim to be organic, eco conscious and fair trade still penalize you for opting for a milk alternative (by charging extra, like up to $1).
As a badly lactose intolerant person, I get that oatmilk is 2x the cost. But please, you are putting in 15 cents of oatmilk, and charging 0.75 to 1.00 extra for it.
A small cup of black coffee with oatmilk for $3.50. Please.
The markup makes sense for lattes -- 12 ounces of whole milk may be $.36 at retail milk prices, but 12oz of oat milk is closer to $1.50 (see my other comment for the price comparison).
There's still a rather significant cost difference between the two. In my local market, a one gallon container of whole milk is $3.89 retail, while the barista-blend of Califa Oat Milk is $4.39 for a one quart container (or $4.99 for a half gal of Oatly).
Not really super surprising— the volumes are way lower and there's less subsidizing going on. On a grocery store shelf here in Ontario, you can get 4L of 2% regular milk for $5. But the Earth's Own products, which include oat and soy milk? Those are more like $6 for a single litre.
As a parent of young kids, we easily do 1L+ of milk per day, even when we drink water as our meal beverage. It goes on cereal in the mornings + a glass before bed + it's an ingredient for certain meals (think baking, cheese sauces, that kind of thing).
I used to make yogurt and cheese as well, but it wasn't really cost/labour effective to do so, even with milk being as cheap as it is.
Beyond the cost from the supplier, perhaps because there is a greater overhead associated with supplying that milk to a minority of customers. If everyone was drinking oat milk by default I don't think there would be a $1 upcharge.
The amount of oat you have to feed a cow to get a single litre is not even close to the literal handful you need for an oat-based milk - let alone the time and how of work that went into caring for the cows, handling the mess, etc.
It should not even be close. We simply industrialized the whole diary thing, and consider it essential.
And I say this as someone who cannot live without cheese. It should just be way more expensive and reflect the cost it has on the environment/society.
This charge was finally removed a few months ago at their UK locations, so it seems more or less inevitable in the US given that the UK is often a vegan/plant-based testbed for many US chains: https://plantbasednews.org/lifestyle/food/starbucks-ends-veg...
There is a death spiral that can occur when demand for dairy milk declines below a level where the supply chain can no longer support itself economically. Milk consumption is down 40% from the 70s in the US, 2730 dairy farms went out of business between 2018 and 2020, and if I had to hazard a guess, younger folks are going to prefer non dairy alternatives (for a variety of reasons).
This is good. Bovine animal husbandry is one of the biggest contributors to climate change, and we as a society should allow the market to kill the industry before it kills us.
And how many people are those "some people?" If it's less than 100% of all current milk drinkers, there is some benefit to be had, and the more people that are comfortable with milk substitutes more often, the greater that benefit. The point is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, not get to 0, which isn't possible with milk alternatives either.
Is this including methane in GHG emissions? Looking at the following chart, we’re much closer to a balance with methane than CO2. Shifting fossil fuel use could put us into a balance.
Don't have the time to investigate the data, however, I have suspicion that they are neglecting the additional meat production from raising cattle.
Dairy is only a fraction of the overall cattle industry, and an even smaller part of supplying the protein needs of people necessary to live healthy lives.
Not only that, as per article:
> A liter of dairy milk is not comparable to a liter of plant-based milk in terms of its nutritional profile.
I think the focus on cows is kind of ridiculous. Our world's natural balance before humans included vast numbers of ruminants over vast expanses of the world. (e.g. huge populations of forest buffalo in Europe, vast Mammoth and Bison herds in North America).
This is an issue being pushed with the intention of distracting from the real issue: fossil fuel use.
> This is an issue being pushed with the intention of distracting from the real issue: fossil fuel use.
This part is still horribly true though.
Emmisions related to livestock are 5.8% of _all_ global CO2 and other GHG emissions [0]
In comparison Transport emissions are 16.2%. [0]
The steel industry as a single industry accounts for 7.2% of emissions.[0]
Methane leaks from Oil and gas drill sites and abandoned wells alone account for 5.8% of global emissions. [0]
Sure we need to look into all fronts but before we guilt people into oat milk shouldn't we, via policy, enforce leak cleanup of abandoned Oil&Gas drill sites?
Do we have to do these things in a specific order? Can't we do them in parallel? I suspect you'll find the cross section of people who want to reduce agricultural CO2 emissions and those who want to clean up gas and oil leaks to be quite large.
This is always the counter argument but I never see any mediatic outrage towards Oil&Gas except for the odd Oil spill and the periodic outrage at fuel prices on every crude price rise.
Policy measures forcing Oil&Gas to clean-up or to internalize the environmental costs of emissions are _never_ part of public debate and to me that is worrying.
Is this another story in the big oil agenda to throw dirt on anything else, see what sticks and keep the eyes off of their dirty doings? Remember folks, over 50% of pollution is done by fossil extracting industry.
How about start heavily invest in clean, or at least cleaner, energy production instead of getting this crap on HN front page. Flagged this crap.
"The extraction and processing of natural resources has accelerated over the last two decades, and accounts for more than 90 per cent of our biodiversity loss and water stress and approximately half of our climate change impacts."
This includes farming, as well as extraction of fossil fuels, minerals etc. In fact, the climate change impact of farming (biomass extraction) is about the same as fossil fuel extraction, according to that study.
Thankfully, this isn't the only think people are trying to be better about. I think it's good to try and tackle a problem from multiple angles.
I also don't think anyone is trying to (realistically) take away your milk. It is useful though to inform people about the impacts of their choice, and let them make an informed decision.
Thanks for the input. I thought about it some more, and gave the article another spin, and the thing that really impacted me was the environmental hazard of cattle — eutrophication to use the technical term.
Bio diversity, while not quite the same risk as climate change, is another hazard well worth focusing on. What’s the point of tackling greenhouse emissions if we live in a Speaker for the Dead biological dead-end with only a handful of ubiquitous species?
"Milk alternatives" (i.e. products marketed as such) are only so in the same sense that any food is a milk alternative, namely that they can both provide nutrition. That's about as far as the similarity goes.
I don't drink much milk but when a do there is little better than cold milk in a chilled glass. My experience with the alternatives is that at best they tend to taste like they were strained through a used sweat sock. At worst they're like drinking latex paint.
I'm sure the "but my brand" crowd will disagree based on the subjectivity of their lack of taste but they'll be wrong.
In the end if we believe that milk is a driving force I'm climate change we might as well just start hoping for a giant asteroid to end it all now.
i am gonna guess that oat milk costs a lot more than milk...
yep, $5.19 for a quart at walmart....as for milk? $3.50 for a gallon...
same thing for artificial meat or even soy protein--easily more expensive than regular pork/hamburger/chicken...
no surprise, seeing as how most of eco-leftism is really just propaganda aimed to increasing profits...and this propaganda is always aimed to young people who are willing to spend more money to send a signal to others about their conscientiousness...and also easily manipulated by propaganda
Oat milk tastes pretty good and from the charts it’s a good balance between land and water use and emissions given. I keep a smaller carton of milk next to a similar sized oat milk one these days.
My only concern is if some studies will come out in a few years showing oat milk health effects similar to what is being discovered about soy. I don’t have all knowledge on this, but apparently soy can mess with hormones. It’s not going to kill nearly anyone, but it’s worth being aware of.
The “soy can mess with hormones” meme comes from the fact that soy contains weak estrogen like compounds, and the internet has blown up about it (particularly in health and fitness circles where there’s a good deal of concern about maintaining one’s manliness).
What gets left out is the fact that phytoestrogens are ubiquitous, found in many plant foods. [0]
All our pediatricians strongly advised foregoing soy based alternatives (son had a milk-protein allergy), at least until he is 2, better even longer.
The argument from the less concerned was something along: Better safe then sorry, no one can say what larger amounts of estrogen will do to a boy well below 1.
Doctors are inherently risk averse, all that means is “we don’t know, and there’s not much downside to not doing it, so we might as well advise against”.
Saying “no one can say” means they literally have no idea. It’s not all that different than the statement “no one can say that 5G doesn’t cause cancer”.
Note that phytoestrogens are categorically not human estrogen, they are simply compounds that mimic some of estrogen’s properties.
Many doctors also tell pregnant women to stay away from soy. One doctor linked me to a study that male babies from mothers that drank soy during pregnancy had statistically smaller genitalia.
You might be right about “overly cautious” but I think doctors being that way is more reputable than gym rats quoting their favorite fitness blog.
Pregnant women have been consuming soy foods for thousands of years in East Asia, there should be an overwhelmingly large amount of studies that suggest ill effects to weigh against that.
Pregnant women have been consuming all kinds of food for centuries.
We also took insane child mortality numbers and all kinds of defects for granted.
Our mothers still consumed food that has a tendency to contain/grow listeria. Then it was found in several cases where the reason for the death of the child was not known.
Now pregnant women (at least in Europe) are strongly advised to avoid products from raw milk and uncooked meat (hams and salami.
Yes, and those changes happened in the face of clear and overwhelming scientific evidence.
I’m not advocating blind adherence to tradition, I’m simply stating that the Null hypothesis is that soy foods are perfectly fine for health, until actual scientific evidence proves otherwise. All that exists not amounts to nothing more than conjecture, which, given the amount of attention this topic has gotten over the years, one would presume more evidence would be present by now.
Most oat milk people are drinking have half its calories from processed vegetable oils. There have been many threads on HN about the unhealthy issues with these oils. Get the ones that are just oats and water, but they won't be "creamy" like milk without fats.
Nutritionally and chemically, oat and cow milk are completely different. Cow milk has 4x more protein, 2x more fat, and 1/2 the carbs. Oat milk contains 50% more sugar. It also doesn't produce the same results when used in, for example, baking.
I appreciate the sentiment, but getting people to switch seems as futile as converting a steak lover to strict veganism.
Cows graze land that is not able to be farmed, and the globalized trade of plant material is dependent on Russian fertilizers. Plant based milk ofc comes out better when you don't count the complete lifecycles.
I like oat milk in coffee/chocolate scenarios, and almond milk's my preference for cereal. Also I sometimes suffer from tooth sensitivity and I've found almond milk particularly soothing in that context.
Let's for a moment assume that an almond tree serves no other purpose than to produce almonds (for almond milk), and a dairy cow serves no other purpose than to produce milk.
The average dairy cow produces 2320 gallons of milk per year.
Dairy cows drink 40 gallons of water per day, which is about 14600 gallons per year.
A grown dairy cow eats about 30 pounds of food per day - 50% grain and 50% grass, so about 5475 pounds of grain per year.
It takes 127 gallons of water to produce 1 pound of maize.
Not counting the water requirements for grass, and assuming that our cow only eats maize, we'll need 695325 gallons to of water to feed the cow.
It takes 22000 gallons of water to irrigate an acre of land. Each acre produces 2 tons of hay, so we'll need 11000 gallons per ton of hay or 11 gallons per pound, which is 60225 gallons of water for grass.
Total water consumption of 1 cow per year for grass + grain + drinking water = 770150 gallons.
That brings us to needing 770150 gallons of water to produce 2320 gallons of cow milk.
So, about 331 gallons of water to make 1 gallon of cow milk.
They say that each almond requires 1.1 gallons of water.
1 pound of shelled almonds = 3.63 cups of almonds.
There are 416 almonds in a pound. So, about 26 per ounce, and 208 per cup.
There are 16 cups in a gallon.
To make almond milk, we mix 6 cups of water for each cup of almonds, which will yield us about 6.5 cups of almond milk.
It'll take 2.46 cups of almonds to make 1 gallon of almond milk, so 512 almonds, so 563 gallons of water.
Things we're not accounting for in the above comparison:
The water cost of producing pesticides, fertilizers.
The water cost of producing health treatments for cows.
The water cost of producing diesel to transport grains to the cows.
The water cost of producing electricity and packaging.
Cow's milk is typically fortified to include additional nutrients. You're getting roughly the equivalent of that in fortified soy milk, except for maybe less fat and cholesterol.
Most children would do just fine with soy milk as an alternative.
I was responding to a post that also did not show evidence.
> The height difference for a child aged 3 y consuming 3 cups noncow milk/d relative to 3 cups cow milk/d was 1.5 cm (95% CI: 0.8, 2.0 cm).
We're talking about 1.5cm here. I guess if you're training your kid to be an olympic athlete then stick to cow's milk, but they'll be fine in the general sense with an similarly nutritious alternative. Lactose-intolerant kids aren't horrifically short or malnourished.
There's a general fear that cow's milk is some sort of necessity (as instilled by the dairy lobby), but it's not. The outcomes are negligible given an otherwise normal diet.
I'm not gonna purposely stunt my child's growth over the selection of drink product at the grocery store. 1.5cm at 3yo is 3-5% of the kids total growth since born and probably more significant if you subtract 1 year of breastfeeding. That would be 1.5cm within 2 years of growth.
Your grandkids may very well experience climate-related famine, but hopefully they'll find solace in their parents being a few cm taller than the lactose intolerant.
This is a little bit of a ridiculous way to approach nutrition. My point is that very few people actually need cow's milk to the extent that the dairy industry would lead you to believe. A few cm does not negate that. Compared to most of human history we live in a time of nutritional abundance.
my understanding about this is that milk production is not subsidized so that poor people can afford it, but so that farmers can afford to continue producing it. in some places milk production is not profitable and farmers would go out of business without government support.
the price they get paid for their milk does not depend on what the consumers would be willing to pay, but on the large milk production companies who buy all their milk and dictate what they are willing to pay, and without subsidies they would simply buy their milk elsewhere.
> milk production is not subsidized so that poor people can afford it, but so that farmers can afford to continue producing it.
Yes, because poor people can't afford to pay the prices required to sustain enough production. And because dairy is a staple, especially in rough times, it's in governments' interest to maintain production.
Depends upon where you are in the world. In rich countries local producers are outcompeted by producers in lower cost regions. Without price supports the local industry would collapse.
If a country's food supply becomes completely dependent upon imports, then this gives the exporter political power over the importer, and also reduces the importer's resilience to disasters.
according to some sources we have overproduction of milk worldwide. so stopping subsidies will not raise the price of milk on the market. it will only put those farmers out of business that don't have a profitable milk production.
the choice is between subsidizing farmers to produce milk or paying them welfare checks.
the EU is doing this, and they don't exactly have a problem with lots of poor people not being able to afford higher milk prices. more likely higher prices would lead to less consumption even among those that could afford it.
yes of course. that doesn't change anything. infant formula is already very expensive. poor people can't afford anything but their own breast milk for their babies.
one interesting argument that i read was that without meat and dairy production we would not have enough natural fertilizer and we would have to resort to chemical fertilizers instead. i haven't been able to verify this, but if true then organic vegan food production may not be possible without livestock. (unless we change how human waste is being collected)
Would be interesting to see how many people enjoy their meat and animal products if taken to a facility where said animals are kept, fed, killed etc. Wouldn't be surprised if cruelty to animals is the current generation's cigarette excessive smoking / genocide / rape and pillaging in wars etc. i.e. how could humans ever do this.
