Yeah, in my country oat milk is now taxed as a juice, of course milk isn't. So the plant based alternative is now 2x the price of cow milk. Thanx Milk industry.
It’s considered an Ultraproceed food item. Just look up how it’s made and what’s added to it (oils, emulsifiers, fortified with minerals). It’s basically liquid cereal, but maybe worse.
There’s essentially no evidence that the degree of ultraprocessing affects a food’s healthfulness. There are tenuous and broad associations between UPF content of a diet and health outcomes, but these are based on invalidated FFQs for the exposure we’re interested in, and all the subgroup analyses where available suggest this is driven by SSBs and processed meat.
I’m not sure why we’d consider oils, emulsifiers or fortification and indicator of poor health outcomes.
Whole grain cereals are associated with positive health outcomes so I’m not sure why something being a liquid cereal would be a negative.
FWIW I would agree that oat milk is probably an inferior milk to dairy in most aspects except fibre content, but that’s not because of the reasons you gave. And soy milk seems either equal or superior to dairy milk in all outcomes that I’ve seen.
With dairy, is especially important to go for the organic options. In generally (excluding parts of Asia), humans have been cultivating livestock and consuming dairy for tens of thousands of years. Our bodies are evolved for it, but not the ultra processed goop and all the added sugar everywhere. If you want to avoid animal products, it’s probably best to just drink water than these engineered “milks”.
