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Comment by xfiz | Hacker News Reader

The author should write a similar article about himself, because the whole article is filled with dubious claims and misguided evidence. The two main claims are "Since the GI is a measure of how much of a negative response your body has to certain sugars" and "research showing harms from canola oil". Neither can be ascertained. A big problem with nutritional science is that it's complex, therefore it is neigh impossible to discover the truth how specific foods really impact the body. I'm also of the opinion that the term "healthy" shouldn't be really used. Here I go with Paracelsus: "All things are poison, and nothing is without poison; the dosage alone makes it so a thing is not a poison." The author invites us to his newsletter "on getting healthy, wealthy, and wise." Yeah, it's all a baseless marketing ploy by, and for, the author.

I want to note, I'm making no argument that Oatly should be considered healthy though.

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i agree wholeheartedly with the spirit of your comment, but saying "nutritional science is complex" or "the dosage alone makes it so that a thing is not a poison" does not help people figure out what foods to choose or how much to consume.

looking at the glycemic index is a useful heuristic and some of the research on canola oil makes me skeptical of it, and i think it is good for the author to point that out, as it suggests that oat milk might not be as safe as it is marketed to be.

another heuristic is biasing in favor of food that is processed less eg eating a bowl of oats is probably a better idea than drinking the analogous amount of oatly. similarly, it is a good idea to eat foods that people like you have been eating for long times, which in the oats vs oatly example favors the oats.

the precautionary principle suggests that the onus is to verify the safety of a given new food, not to prove that it is unsafe.

The one thing I'd change there is to delete the word "new" from the last sentence.

There are all sorts of foods that are terrible from a health perspective, but get grandfathered into a culture because they became popular before science really caught on. If you're closely analyzing the biochemistry of oatly or soy milk or whatever, and finger-wagging at others for drinking them, but still drink beer on a regular basis, you may be engaging in premature optimization.

Or, just looking at sugars: A serving of Oatly does contain 7g of sugar. The same amount of whole milk contains 13. You don't notice it because lactose tastes less sweet than many other sugars, but it's still a pretty generous dose of calories in the form of simple carbohydrates. I can't personally make the glycemic index comparison, because, while I can guess, I have no actual idea what the glycemic index of two tablespoons of lactose would be. Or even if measuring that would tell you anything about the glycemic index of a complex foodstuff that happens to contain that much lactose. I suspect you can't actually directly infer the one from the other, so, unlike the author of TFA, I think I might choose to proceed with caution there.

As far as what to consume: The messaging out there is remarkably consistent, as long as you tune out any information that's being provided by people who are trying to sell you something. Be it an actual foodstuff, a book, fitness lessons, or even just advertising. Even Michael Pollan nailed it pretty early in his career. In a single sentence, too. It's just that then he had to keep going, because stopping there wouldn't have made for much of a career as an author.

> There are all sorts of foods that are terrible from a health perspective, but get grandfathered into a culture because they became popular before science really caught on.

Yes and no. There is some element of an inherent scientific method involved in having cultures eat various foods for tens of thousands of years and then seeing which ones are still around at the end of the “experiment”

Surely the species of most foods available nowadays are only a couple centuries or decades old?

Plus there's survivor bias: just because population A survived on food X, doesn't mean it won't halve the life expectancy when introduced to population B. E.g. high calory foods in the oceania populations caused obesity.

Perhaps there's some effect there, but this idea that more competitively successful cultures have healthier diets is difficult to reconcile with a lot of other memes around health food.

One also has to reckon with the fact that people's health needs were very different a couple hundred years ago. Once upon a time, the greatest health concern was getting enough nutrition. Also, when your life expectancy is 30, you probably don't give a damn that, if by some chance you live to see 70, all those preserved foods you used to get through the winter will end up having increased the chance that the thing that eventually kills you is stomach cancer.

As TFA's hand-wringing about sugar clearly indicates, though, we're just not playing the same game our ancestors did. The major worry nowadays that it is now, uniquely in history, possible for almost anyone's primary health concern to be that they're getting too much of a good thing.

Not to mention Glycemic Index of foods is misleading. If you have a lot of fiber in your gut it slows down the digestion of everything. GI can’t be used in isolation. It’s useful to know, but Oatly also has a lot of fiber in it. I am less keen on the Canola oil though.

No only that, its only relevant if you have diabetes/pre-diabetic markers. If you're not then it's as relevant to you as being concerned about lactose if you're not lactose intolerant.

It’s relevant, but also easy to measure. GI is a guess at what the product will do to your blood sugar. A diet high in fiber they included oatly with a meal is going to give a very different insulin response than oatly in isolation which will likely be different again when compared to pure maltose. I am not diabetic and had fun measuring my blood sugar for a while. Full meals with a lot of fiber, even if they included high GI foods didn’t do a lot to my blood sugar compared to high GI foods in isolation. So, as a diabetic, you just have to know how your body handles some foods and how best to consume them (or not).

It's true that if you eat fat, protein and fibre alongside sugars, the effective GI of the sugars is reduced.

But I really don't think see how that makes measurements of individual foods misleading. How is it any different than individual foods being labelled with calorie counts and macro-nutrient figures?

Edit: I think the article uses the high GI of a sugar ingredient to claim that Oatly is bad - yes, this is misleading; the GI of the whole product is what matters.

I suspect the article is mostly about getting seo juice for the newsletter so it boosts his clients more when he links to them.

Though I’m not in seo myself, so I don’t know how these things work really.

That's the main problem I face with studies with Food/Dieting etc etc.

You can equally claims both sides and reject both studies. Nobody know anything for sure and you can prove equally wrong/right both sides.

Eg: Cow milk is bad while whole generations have drank them.

TFA cites eight peer reviewed articles to support his claims about the harms of canola oil. "We can't know anything" is an easier argument to make than taking an affirmative position one way or another, but it isn't insightful or interesting.

Edit: Others in this thread have made more substantive arguments about flaws with the research cited.

Was the main problem the glucose spike? Could a person just test it out by measuring their blood glucose levels?

Though this is my anecdotal experience, I've had an interesting journey related to food sensitivities and realizing how much certain foods actually caused physical pain when eating them once I had removed them and allowed my body to become de-conditioned to that level of pain/stress; conditioning is the action of not noticing, eliminating it from your awareness, however from my experience that shows that that doesn't mean something you don't notice isn't harming you or causing you problem. I had done an Igg food sensitivity test (inflammatory marker diagnostic; just a few drops of blood on a card that would get sent in) to test for ~200 foods. I removed the foods that showed up and I felt better. Weeks later multiple times with different foods I would eat one of the foods on the list and I was amazed at how clearly I could feel, experience the physical pain - some severe - that I would experience from now eating it.

This brings me to another point I wanted to make. You said the term "healthy" shouldn't be used, I'd posit that a caveat is necessary to avoid generalization - generalization which is the actual culprit: "may not be healthy for you specifically." It's very naive to ignore that though most of us have a head, two arms, two legs, etc. that our inner workings aren't complex and diverse - including our sensitivity level and tolerances for different types of stressors. We can know however inflammation in the body can lead to Alzheimers-Dementia, and that sugars carbohydrates, and certain other foods like dairy are highly inflammatory (for everyone) - whether that causes enough dysfunction for you to eliminate them from your diet or not is one question. Another question is perhaps a person is using these foods to self-medicate: inflammation has a depressant effect on the nervous system, and so they could be eating certain foods - perhaps dependant on them - to regulate their mood, stress, etc. This may work for some people their whole lives, it may also lead to dis-ease progression over decades.

And to reference your Paracelsus quote, it's not solely the dosage but a dosage that acts poisonous will differ between people. Some might be okay for some people, any tiny amount may be problematic for some people. The vague and arguably dismissive rhetoric of "everything in moderation" in response to when people reply in regards to people's comments on eating food they know is unhealthy for them and makes them feel sick. The dismissive behaviour of of parents for when their children not liking certain food and not wanting to eat it, they force or incentivize them to continue to eat food that harms them with a reward like dessert that further harms them is also problematic and I believe the starting point for many people who then struggle later in life in various ways. Eventually the child may become conditioned to not feeling the harm of the food, perhaps with the added aid of the numbing effect of the inflammation (the depressant effect on the nervous system), and become disconnected from a foundational cause or source of future dis-ease progression related symptoms. Parts of this pattern were certainly part of my journey.

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