> I do doubt that this would be as nutritious to humans as milk from cows or other mammals.
From the article:
containing nearly four times the protein of cow’s milk
And we needn't get into how "coconut milk", "almond milk", etc. are somehow inappropriate uses of "milk" despite their entry into the lexicon millennia ago.
It isn't cow milk, but other than that I'm not really sure what you're saying. Milk is what you get when milking an animal. It's a pretty broad term. However I do doubt that this would be as nutritious to humans as milk from cows or other mammals.
> It's the cow dairy industry that is trying to appropriate the word.
The word milk can be traced back thousands of years to the indo-european form h2mel?- which means... milk. Your attempt to re-frame this is ridiculous.
> Also, "milk" has referred to any thick, white substance for centuries now. Consider "milk of magnesia".
These are called metaphors. They do not attempt to mislead and confuse people.
The whole point of calling almond juice "milk" is to confuse people.
> It's been interesting watching the reactionary rally against dairy over the last 10 years. Watching laypeople with zero scientific background write editorials on nutrition-adjacent topics is always a great workout of patience.
> One of the more bewildering things I see is comparison of mammalian milks to plant milks […]
It is a case of hypocrisy on both sides.
You are correct in your observation that most plant «milks» are nutritionally poor substitutes for mammalian milks. «Milk» perhaps should not be used in this context, but it is an accepted convenience due to the concept of «milk» being well known and recognised. The base of such drinks is effectively a sediment obtained through grinding grains or nuts and fixed with a plant based thickening agent (e.g. tapioca starch or xantham gum) to prevent the grounds from separating from the water. Extra nutrients may be added (cheap maltodextrin as a sweetener or plant oils) and most of them do not increase a nutritional value of such a drink.
Without descending into a debate discussing the merits (or the lack thereof) of the nutritional profile of the cow's milk, the story of it is convoluted at the very least.
The nutritional profile of the cow's milk can vary wildly depending on what the cow was fed with, and grain fed cows and «free range» cows will produce will produce milk with a vastly different balance of fatty acids:
– The former: «forcefully» increased O-6 (through the grain ingestion) and lower O-3 and monounsaturated fatty acids (due to most grains being poor in both) in the content;
– The latter: balanced O-3 and monounsaturated fatty acids composition due to the lack of interference with the cow's biology. The actual balance is a tricky affair as it depends on how nutritionally rich is the soil that the grass has grown on and which the cow has grazed on.
That is the first problem. Secondly, there is an issue of cows being tended to by veterinary professionals and farmers who inject antibiotics for the animal's wellbeing reason (the former) and add growth hormones to encourage faster cow's growth and milk producing readiness (the latter). Whilst the antibiotics are fairly quickly removed from the body (whilst at least temporarily disturbing the biological homeostasis), the hormones are particularly tricky as they have a propensity to stay in the body for a very long time, and they usually disturb the hormonal balance in the body. Hormonal therapy (in humans and in animals) is still not well understood and is an area of active research, hence why hormonal treatments are a sparely used medicine oftentimes laden with complications. Both types of substances, however, leech into the milk and end up in consumer's hands, which has been acknowledged as an issue and even resulted in actions of different governments around the world to put specific regulations into place. And since lactation is also a hormonal process, humans ingesting the mammalian milk have been receiving a steady supply of animal's own hormones that are exogenous to the human body and with largely unknown long term effects. We have certainly not developed horns, tails and udders by virtue of drinking milk, but the long terms effects have been questioned at least.
Therefore, the nutritional composition of the industrially produced cow's milk today is complicated.
The real issue is that both sides push their own respective agenda, oftentimes driven by questionable motives, aiming to win or gain a upper hand at any cost.
> This is a really weird assertion to make when dairy has been a massively important staple of advanced societies for thousands of years, and continues to be in places like rural India, Turkey, Central Asia […]
Goat/buffalo, sheep and camel milk, respectively, – for each named region and in limited amounts. Not even remotely comparable to the Western scale.
Consuming camel milk in Central Asia specifically has been a historical necessity due to it being vast, too dry or too rugged for farming, therefore a quick fix for the malnourishment problem was required. It became the camel, an animal that dwelled in and was adapted for life in a harsh climate and did not require large pastures. Should there have been the lush greenery and an abundance of plants, the history of nutrition in Central Asia would have taken a different turn.
Also, further down below you mention the milk consumption in China.
China is big, the climate is different in different parts of China: northern China has long winters that are cold, dry, below freezing, and long summers that are hot and humid. Southern China, on other hand, is mostly subtropical and evergreen. Nutritional habits are also different in the north and in the south: wheat is used instead of rice in the north as rice requires a lot of water to grow, and wheat is virtually unheard of in the south and rice is ubiquitous. Even if the cow's milk is consumed in China, it would be predominantly in the north but not in the south where it is missing from the local dietary intake altogether.
Having said that, I do not think it is correct to project that, based on the limited milk consumption in a few isolated parts of China, it was a commonplace in the past.
> The article does not mention cow milk's health implications, and only focuses on debunking Oatly's alleged health benefits
The article links to an entire other article discussing cow milk's health implications.
> If both options are equally unhealthy (which is at the minimum the biased impression the article gives by not discussing cow milk), at the minimum the moral one should be chosen.
Cow's milk and oat milk aren't the only two alternatives, though. Milk substitutes abound, some of them having much better health and moral implications (and as discussed in this thread, milk substitutes can be made at home).
>But cow milk in general (and especially in Whole Milk form) is well proven to be unhealthy in the quantities usually recommended.
Do you have a source on that statement? What are the quantities that are usually recommended, and by whom are they recommended?
>There’s a good reason why nobody else drinks milk like Americans do.
That's simply not true. The Scandinavian countries all consume more milk per capita than the US. Coincidentally, Scandinavia is also where Oatly is from.
> I've never seen a carton of oat milk and thought it contained dairy
I have no issues with "<plant> milk" products and labeling them like that, but people do get confused about their nutritional profiles, thinking they're substitutes for milk. They're not, and they're chemically different enough that they're not good substitutes for cooking. About the only thing they're good substitutes for is liquid milk, though I hear oat milk foams up well for a cappuccino.
> will assume that "soy milk" is like normal milk because it's called "soy milk"
I may be elitist, but I'd put that in the "dumb" category. I'm also not a parent so didn't look into babies nutrition yet, but I suspect feeding them anything but infant milk as a replacement for the mother's milk isn't going to do much good. Going in this direction, let's remove "milk" from all the products that aren't suitable. "skimmed milk", "chocolate milk", etc. ;)
> milk-industry propaganda at the time said it was important for kids to drink a bunch of milk for bones and growth and other stuff that was never true and was known to never be true.
You seem to be saying that the human body cannot make productive use of the calcium from cow's milk. Do you have a source for this?
> What would you predict are the amount of people total who bought almond milk instead of semi-skimmed?
Likely a large amount of people about to or becoming obsessed with fitness, or vegan recipes. The problem here is that all those "milk alternatives" have absolutely nothing to do with milk whatsoever, they have different handling and nutritional value (or lack of it; to the detriment of innocent kids suffering their parents' obsession). For most people, using the word "milk" will pull all kinds of wrong associations from their minds' latent spaces, which they won't be able to evaluate and ignore.
> We lighlty compare real milk with plant based milk without being honest about the completely different properties of the two
For sure, there are many differences between plant based and dairy milk. Besides the protein levels, for example, a large percentage of humans - between 10 and 90 percent depending on genetic background - are lactose intolerant and can't digest animal milk. Plant based milks don't have this problem - very few people can't digest oats, and for those few who do have a problem with oats, they can switch to almond, rice, soy, cashew or even peanut milk. Sure, these have less protein than dairy milk, but they more than make up for it in diversity and benefit to the environment, and it's easy to adapt your diet to get the protein elsewhere.
So when being more honest in our comparisons - a good thing, for sure - we must compare all of these things and not just the amount of protein. For me personally, being one of those lactose intolerant people, plant based milks definitely win. For another person they may not.
> its not equivalent nor replacement in ie nutrition nor taste
Speak for yourself, it might not have the same nutritional value (but also not the same amount of hormones and/or antibiotics), but there are a few oat based milks (e.g. Alpro This Is Not Milk) that have almost the same mouth feel as cow milk (personally, I find that too fatty and prefer the non-fatty tasting oat milk).
> Its easy to buy bio milk which comes from free grazing cows
Uh huh, and how many people are doing that, especially close to the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder? There are plenty of plant based milk with a hefty trend markup, but least here in Germany the discount supermarkets have plenty of cheap plant based milk that is the same price as cow milk, and you don't have to squeeze milk from an animal for that.
> I get your point but raw milk is 3.5% fat it has to be processed to be ready for human consumption
I'm confused - are you suggesting that raw milk is unfit for consumption due to the fat content?
I ask because I (and probably lots of the other Indians on here) grew up drinking raw buffalo (Asian Water Buffalo) milk at home. That's about 7-8% fat. I knew plenty of people who got raw cow milk as well.
Of course, it was standard practice to "cook" the milk before consumption, which would cause cream to separate out. The cream would be skimmed off for other purposes, but usually the kids got the full cream milk.
> But vegans should be under no illusions that almond milk or soy milk is any kind of milk substitute.
When it comes to feeding infants, sure, but my usage of soy milk as an adult is definitely as a substitute for milk. I use it in virtually all the places cow's milk is typically used: in my cereal, coffee, mixed with chocolate syrup, in most recipes that call for milk.... No need to get so up in arms about call things like soy milk a "milk" drink/substitute. In the vast majority of cases, it functions exactly the same.
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=100+g+cow%27s+milk says it's primarily carbohydrates (7g/100g), protein (4g), and a bit of fat (2g) suspended in water. Also, the website is somewhat confusing, but poking around a bit it looks like they are targeting the production of protein (casein specifically), not fat. You may be attacking a strawman here...
> You need at least a magnitude higher funding unless you plan to outsource everything to India.
... as well as a large fraction of the world's population, for no discernible reason.
From the article: containing nearly four times the protein of cow’s milk
And we needn't get into how "coconut milk", "almond milk", etc. are somehow inappropriate uses of "milk" despite their entry into the lexicon millennia ago.
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