[rguzman]

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.

[mumblemumble]

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.

[CPLX]

> 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”

[mumblemumble]

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.

[jiggunjer]

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.