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.

You make it sound as if no-one drinks pure milk in your environment? I find THAT weird.

I had no idea that people didn't drink milk on its own. Apparently some Europeans don't. I eat cereal mostly to drink milk. If Oatly was a good substitute, I'd probably have started using it. (I haven't tried it yet.)

340ml is 0.08 gallons. That's consistent with "about a bowl of cereal."

But we didn't have the internet yet, so how do you fact check it? The TV said so.

I do see fewer people interested in milk as you go younger here, I think that once it was more broadly understood that milk is marginal the pressure to drink it was gone but there was still some cultural kind of urban legend nonsense that is really hard to get rid of in a society that doesn't trust experts. Which I can't blame anyone for if we're talking about nutritional experts because anyone alive for more than twenty years has seen them flip their opinion on at least a quarter of food types.

It is notable that in that part of my family, half the kids ended up lactose intolerant and still are frustrated about their parents for making them sick all the time as kids by requiring them to drink something they didn't want to drink anyway.

I liked chocolate milk because who doesn't, but after someone for the first time pointed out that it's kinda weird for humans to drink milk intended for calves (maybe I was 13 or 14?) I pretty much just stopped drinking it because it just wasn't that good anyway and now I had an excuse. My brother and mother are both lactose intolerant, it turns out.

I think a lot of people have felt low grade sick their entire lives in the US because they've never gone for long enough without dairy to notice.

Is it weird? Weird is completely abstract. Is eating the female component of a chickens reproductive output (aka an egg) weird? Is it weird to harvest oats and then harvest/extract enzymes, digest oats and mix them with processed rapeseed oil so we can avoid drinking cows milk?

At least if you drink -freshly- pasteurised cows milk you know there are fewer moving parts in the process of getting ingredient into your system.

Food wise everything is weird when you look at it under the right setting. Tofu is like the cheese of a soybean. Burgers are random bits of animal ground up flattened and fried. Mushrooms and fungi are weird almost alien growths. Fish are weird and slimy. Prawns are almost like giant insects from the sea.

When I think about attitudes towards food, I find it weirder that when we eat pork but are happy to throw away all the offal, cheeks, neck, knuckle, ears, ribs(!!!) and just keep the chops and some back for bacon because it is "weird" to eat all those other bits. Or with a chicken we eat just the breast and dump the rest. And look at Chinese people as weird for eating chickens feet. At least they don't waste the animals they eat!

Recently on a different discussion board some guy mentioned that he wanted to thaw the fish and left it on a counter instead of in the fridge - after some time he noticed that apparently a fly left eggs on small part of it, after he saw that he threw it into trash. There were various reposnses from "ewwww, you did it right!" to "it was perfectly fine to cook" One of the responses which I remembered was: "you just wasted life and death of this fish"

These are very simple words and seemingly obvious but it caught me by surprise a bit and I noticed that not always I'm thinking about my food like this. In a world where food can be highly processed, where a fish, chicken, pig can no longer resemble living creature but just some meaty pieces it's easy (and comfortable!) to skip, ignore the part that it was living being. I played a bit with this thought in my mind and went into procrastination area - is it "fair" to use life and death of multiple animals and plants to sustain, propel myself and then do nothing productive with this energy?

The same people that consider mouldy Roquefort to be delicious might consider durian a sin against humanity with little appreciation of the hypocrisy at play.

Which kind of proves that dairy is a significant enough part of many cultures' diet that it caused an evolutionary change! But these days you can buy lactase very cheaply in pill form, so really anyone can "have" the adaptation.

And many cultures with genetic lactose intolerance still consume a lot of fermented dairy.

Care to provide some proofs? I live in a post-soviet country and from stories I heard regarding USSR, even adults in factories received milk (for free) daily.

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?

We do eat a lot of yogourt and cheese. The province use to over-produce milk and there was so much advertising to consume it. Everyone kind of got fed up I guess.

Cow milk is recommended as part of the diet of young children, with government guidance noting that although calcium-enriched alternatives to cow milk (such as oat milk with added calcium) seem fine, there is as of yet insufficient data to suggest that replacing cow milk from the diet of young children won't have a negative effect. It's a fair and balanced view I suppose.

In the 70s a dairy campaign taught everyone that three pints of milk a day was healthy, but that kind of propaganda is in the past. Still, the Dutch tend to have a very positive view of our dairy industry, in part aided by animal welfare programs and certifications. That doesn't address the environmental impact of course.

I have switched to cow milk with a certified guarantee of decent treatment of the cows involved for my young son, and oat milk (Oatly usually) for us.

In time of poverty, cow was actually essential part of life. A life saver. You get milk, butter, sour cream, cheese, cottage cheese. I think not every word from this list makes sense to some living in some other countries, because not all products are consumed in other places in the world.

Also, question to people who only drink milk with coffee: Do you buy small processed pouches of milk for one cup of coffee, or do you drink enough coffee to use up a 1L (~4 "cups" in US lingo) packaging of milk before it goes bad in the fridge?

We were given glass of boiled milk every day at school, and I don't remember any kid being lactose intolerant. I didn't like it back then. I prefer cold.

When I'm eating cooked buckwheat grains, glass of milk suits me best to wash it down.

We always have milk at home, my 16 and 13 yo children drink it, or eat with muesli

One of them drinks pure milk, the other much less. I do it from time to time my wife rarely to never.

I drink roughly a gallon a week, personally. Whole, usually.

I've only seen that in American movies (I'm from Europe).

I have a friend who used to drink milk as a teenager and had to stop because it caused some complication. This was 20 years ago, I don't remember the details.

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.

None of that’s going to be in plant milks.

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?

“A doctor curing cancer may be a bit biased against tobacco...”

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.

By no means are these pancakes healthy, but after years of experiments I think I managed to find something that just straddles the barrier between nutritional-waste and nutritional sabotage. And that's fine for one meal a week. Thanks for your concern, though!

Almond hazelnut pancakes are /good/.

Keto has come a long ways since the days of steak and eggs for every meal.

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.

Now if only they can make a 16oz product for those us of who don't use it enough to consume 32oz in 7-10 days...

> 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".

[1] https://www.starbucks.com/menu/product/414/hot?parent=%2Fdri...

An actual Latte has less than half the number of carbs as that https://www.starbucks.com/menu/product/407/hot?parent=%2Fdri...

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.

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).

Oatly or cows milk can be part of a perfectly healthy diet provided use in moderation. If you’re having 3, 12+oz lattes maybe you should consider not doing that.

My favourite in the uk is "innocent".

But I think if you're going to get wound up about canola oil, there are bigger targets than milk substitutes.