Plant Milk Proliferation: Oat, Soy, Almond, and More, But Which Is Best?

Cow milk is out, and plant milk reigns supreme. At least, that's how it feels in the supermarket these days, where the refrigerated section is full of "milk" made from oats, almonds, peanuts, coconuts, soy, macadamia nuts, pistachios, and even peas, with new plants being milked seemingly every day. But this proliferation had us wondering: who invented all these plant milks, and are they better for us and the planet than the OG cow-based beverage? To find out, we're exploring the surprisingly long history of plant-based milks—including why most civilizations preferred them over any animal's, why Henry Ford thought plant milk would replace dairy the way cars replaced horses, and how Vince Lombardi and some catchy ads made drinking cow's milk de rigeur, even for grown-ups. Plus: we've got the inside story of how Swedish underdog Oatly took the third wave coffee world by storm, plus a science-based breakdown of which of these new alt-milks you should be drinking for the maximum health and environmental benefits. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  You don't normally come to Gastropod for experimental Stockholm-based music, but here you go. It's Portable Dogs with the song Choose Choose.

• 0:11Speaker 01

  When I walked down the grocery aisle, there's 10,000 kinds of milk. Almond, soy, and some thin sounding like silk. Oh, there's 10,000 kinds of milk.

• 0:37Speaker 00

  Truly only a slight exaggeration. There are lots of kinds of milk, and there are also lots of songs about them. Everyone's singing about plant-based milks these days.

• 0:46Speaker 02

  Swap that milk for silk with that tasty plant power. And you're feeling plenty good. Oui. Wow, wow, no cow, no, no, no.

• 1:00Speaker 00

  You too might have noticed that when you go to the supermarket, you can get all kinds of milk. And as this oat milk ad proclaims, many of them have no relationship to a cow.

• 1:10Nicola Twilley?

  Soy, almond, and oat are the usual suspects, but you can get rice, and hemp, and pea, and cashew, and mycodemia, and pistachio, and coconut. The list just goes on and on.

• 1:22Speaker 00

  Take oat milk. About a decade ago, I'd never even heard of it. But then, suddenly, oat milk was everywhere. And some people were even willing to pony up around $100 for a carton. Why? What happened?

• 1:33Nicola Twilley?

  The whole plant milk vibe seems to be that they're healthy and good for the planet. But is that true? Are they better for us and for the environment than cow's milk?

• 1:41Speaker 00

  All that, plus the weird story of how we even came to drink cow's milk in the first place. This episode was supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for the Public Understanding of Science, Technology, and Economics, as well as the Burroughs Wellcome Fund for our coverage of biomedical research. Gastropod is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

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• 3:16Nicola Twilley?

  The question of what a plant milk is starts with why we call it milk.

• 3:20Speaker 06

  You know, milk is really, it's a white nutritious liquid that, generally speaking, we obtain through another mammal. But as things have developed, really, many different kinds of white, liquidy, nutritious things have been called milks.

• 3:38Speaker 00

  Jia Chenfu, she goes by Wendy in America. She's a historian and the author of the book The Other Milk. Like she says, all around the world, for hundreds and even thousands of years, people have been turning lots of things into milk. In the Pacific, they grated coconut and pressed that into milk. In North Africa, they made a milk from tiger nuts that eventually became known as horchata in Spain.

• 3:58Nicola Twilley?

  In East Asia, people boiled rice till it was dissolving and then strained it to make a white liquid. In North America, people pounded hickory nuts or pea cans with water to make a nut milk that they used in cooking and fed to babies.

• 4:09Speaker 00

  Soy milk is another one of the earliest milks around.

• 4:12Speaker 06

  Well, using soybeans for food is a really long history, actually. It goes back at least a couple thousand years.

• 4:19Nicola Twilley?

  At first, though, the soybeans were likely just boiled and eaten as beans, often mashed up into a kind of porridge or congee. Wendy says, "Don't imagine delicious edamame you might have as a snack at a sushi restaurant. Those are boiled or steamed immature soybeans. A bowl of boiled and mashed mature soybeans is apparently a little less snackable."

• 4:40Speaker 06

  Generally speaking, the textual references suggest that it was not appetizing.

• 4:44Speaker 00

  And then, another way you could prepare soybeans was to soak them and grind them and press out the liquid, which is white and creamy. But that first step doesn't get you a drinkable milk.

• 4:53Speaker 06

  You don't actually want to drink it at that moment. In fact, if you drink the soy milk at that moment, it will probably taste both very astringent, as well as cause you all sorts of stomach issues, because it's really not edible at that particular moment. If you boil it, that's when you really get soy milk.

• 5:14Nicola Twilley?

  Raw, unboiled soy milk has a couple of compounds in it, one that blocks digestive enzymes and one that's really astringent and bitter. And boiling neutralizes them. But the result still tastes a little beeny.

• 5:26Speaker 00

  That didn't matter so much in the past, because soy milk wasn't typically just drunk as soy milk. It had another purpose. Soybean milk was and is the first step to making tofu.

• 5:34Speaker 06

  You don't have to enjoy soybean milk as a food to get to tofu. You could just use it as an intermediary step, get to tofu, and then just enjoy the tofu.

• 5:42Nicola Twilley?

  Which is mostly what people did. Historically, Chinese people weren't regularly chugging soy milk as a liquid drink. Some did, sometimes. Wendy says it was typically seen as a warming drink for winter and a restorative drink for the week.

• 5:56Speaker 00

  Almond milk is another milk that has been around for at least 1,000 years. It was mentioned in an Islamic medical text in the 8th century as a cough treatment, and it's in a cookbook from Baghdad from the 1200s. It was an ingredient in meat stew and in a dessert custard. Like soy milk, it mostly wasn't consumed as a drink.

• 6:12Nicola Twilley?

  Almond milk made it to Europe via trade, and also because at the time, Spain was under Islamic rule. By the 1300s, almond milk showed up in cookbooks in England and France. It had become popular across Europe.

• 6:24Speaker 02

  Because the church had this long list of things that you couldn't eat on holy days. And holy days were about half the year.

• 6:34Speaker 00

  Mark Kurlansky wrote the book Milk: A 10,000-Year Food Fracass. He told us that Catholics weren't allowed to consume any kind of animal product on holy days. So no meat, of course, but also no animal milk.

• 6:45Speaker 02

  So any milk recipe that was used on a holy day, which as they say was half the days of the year, they used almond milk.

• 6:54Speaker 00

  Mark says that, like in the Middle East, Europeans were mostly using that almond milk in recipes, not drinking it straight.

• 7:00Nicola Twilley?

  This is kind of a weird thing, because when I was a kid, growing up in England, almond milk was not common at all. In fact, I don't remember seeing it on the supermarket shelves till much more recently. So what happened?

• 7:12Speaker 02

  They stopped using almond milk, well, for a couple of reasons. One was the Protestant Reformation, so, you know, the holy days weren't, really didn't have the weight that they once had.

• 7:24Speaker 00

  The Protestant Reformation mostly affected people in Northern Europe. This also happened to be where they had more access to dairy. Ditching Catholicism might have gotten rid of all those holy day restrictions, but that wasn't the only thing. Almonds were also expensive, because they had to be imported to Northern Europe.

• 7:40Nicola Twilley?

  And so by the 1600s, people mostly switched back to dairy for all their sauce and dessert needs. But just like they weren't drinking almond milk, they weren't drinking dairy milk as a liquid beverage either.

• 7:52Speaker 02

  Well, in general, people didn't use to drink milk. They used milk to make things, gruel, and porages, and cheese. But a glass of milk was a strange thing.

• 8:08Speaker 00

  I mean, a glass of milk is a strange thing to me, because it makes me feel sick. And maybe that's why people didn't drink milk in the past. Most of humanity, except for Northern Europeans, were and are lactose intolerant as adults. It's a common explanation for why people in China never really drank much milk.

• 8:23Speaker 06

  But that kind of reasoning actually doesn't really make sense, if only because they didn't know that they were lactose intolerant.

• 8:29Nicola Twilley?

  Connecting digestive distress to earlier milk consumption is a modern idea. And Wendy says that historically, people wouldn't have necessarily made that connection.

• 8:38Speaker 00

  But also, they didn't have a lot of milk. In the Middle East, and in the Americas, and in Asia, and all those places where plant-based milks were first invented, it makes sense that they were using these milk alternatives, because the animals they raised, like llamas, or goats, or yaks, they didn't produce much milk. And so people there didn't really have access to much animal dairy.

• 8:56Nicola Twilley?

  But even in Northern Europe, where the cow was king and most adults were lactose tolerant, it's not like milk was flowing like water. There just wasn't a lot available.

• 9:05Speaker 02

  Nobody had a lot of cows. A farm might have three cows. And it was a seasonal thing.

• 9:14Speaker 02

  Because raising livestock is the seasonal thing.

• 9:17Speaker 00

  It was hard to raise cows. There wasn't a lot of spare food around to feed them a lot over the winter, which is what you need to do if you want milk in the winter. And the animals didn't produce much more milk than they needed to feed their own spring babies, just a little more.

• 9:29Speaker 02

  So, uh, milk was around in the spring and summer. It was like a spring treat.

• 9:35Nicola Twilley?

  And what little milk there was, was mostly turned into things that would last much longer than fragile perishable milk. It pretty much all became butter and cheese. That's how Northern Europeans consumed almost all of their dairy.

• 9:48Speaker 00

  Dairy milk was like soy milk and almond milk. It was turned into something else. Basically, throughout history, almost nobody was just downing liquid milk of any kind. This was true even when dairying started to grow in Europe and then in New England over the centuries.

• 10:00Nicola Twilley?

  But then, in the early 1800s, a new field of science popped up: chemistry. And those chemists started figuring out what food was made from. In the 1830s, a British chemist called William Proudt published a landmark book. He was the first to divide food into the three categories we know today: fat, carbs, and protein. And in that book, he said, "Milk contained all three categories, and this was clearly the most perfect and complete food of all." And as evidence, he pointed out that babies could live on milk alone.

• 10:32Speaker 00

  Mr. Proudt didn't know about the difference between breast milk and cow's milk, or the difference between what babies need and what adult nutritional needs are. He really didn't know much about nutrition at all. Basically, no one did back then. But this book did kick off more of an interest in milk. At the same time, due to social changes, it became unfashionable for upper-class women to breastfeed, and lower-class women were increasingly working out of the home and often didn't have time to breastfeed.

• 10:56Nicola Twilley?

  Women with a shortage of breast milk of their own had always fed their babies with some kind of substitute, but this moment in the mid-1800s was different. Cow's milk started to be seen as almost preferable to breast milk. It was something babies should be drinking.

• 11:10Speaker 00

  But there were some problems at the time. First, cow's milk was expensive. As we said, there just wasn't a lot of it, and most was stored by turning it into butter and cheese. But even more than that, by the mid-1800s, milk was dangerous.

• 11:22Speaker 02

  It was really terrible in cities like New York and Boston, where something like half of the babies died. And, um, you know, a third to a half of the deaths in New York and Boston in the mid-19th century were attributed to drinking bad milk.

• 11:41Speaker 00

  That's almost unbelievable. Mark is saying that about a quarter of all the babies in New York and Boston died because of bad milk. Fresh milk was lethal, but not everyone knew what was killing their babies, and many people believed the authority figures who were saying that cow's milk was the best for them.

• 11:57Nicola Twilley?

  There were a few different reasons why cow's milk got so deadly. Part of the problem was the cities themselves, which were growing really fast in the 1800s, meaning there were lots of babies that needed milk. In response, there was a boom in the urban cow population.

• 12:12Speaker 02

  What they started doing is they started building these dairies next to breweries. And the leftover slop from the breweries was fed to the cows, who lived this horrible life, chained forever in one spot, eating nothing but this gruel from the breweries, which wasn't particularly healthy for them. And so these were very unhealthy cows, and they produced very unhealthy milk.

• 12:38Speaker 00

  This was known as swill milk. The people who owned the dairies would water it down, and the water itself wasn't treated and was full of harmful bacteria and viruses. And then on top of all that, they'd add chalk to the milk to make it look thicker and creamier. It was bad. It made babies sick. Many died from swill milk.

• 12:54Nicola Twilley?

  Then, as the railways were built, the urban dairies were replaced by milk brought in from farms in the countryside. The problem there was that this rural milk was traveling long distances, and there wasn't much in the way of refrigeration, and so any bacteria in the milk had plenty of opportunity to reproduce en route and, yes, kill more babies.

• 13:14Speaker 02

  And another problem was that cows were getting tuberculosis. And if you drink milk from a tuberculin cow, you can get tuberculosis.

• 13:24Nicola Twilley?

  And there wasn't a cure for TB till after World War II. It was a major killer.

• 13:28Speaker 00

  It took a while to link all the infant sickness and death to milk. It wasn't obvious at first that milk was the source of the problem. And at this point, milk had been lauded for decades as a perfect food, which was why so many people kept giving it to their kids.

• 13:41Nicola Twilley?

  By the end of the 1800s and the start of the 1900s, things had reached kind of a crisis. It was increasingly clear milk was lethal, but it was also believed to be an essential food. New York City held a special conference on milk problems to try to figure out what to do. It was the big issue of the day.

• 14:01Speaker 00

  At around the same time, some people had been looking into milk alternatives. In the 1890s in Michigan, John Harvey Kellogg, yes, one of the famous cereal-inventing Kellogg brothers, he started selling a milk made of ground almonds and peanuts, and a woman named Almeda Lambert wrote a cookbook that told readers how to make milk out of peanuts and almonds and hickories and other nuts.

• 14:20Nicola Twilley?

  Lambert was a Seventh-day Adventist, and Kellogg started out as one. Seventh-day Adventists are encouraged to follow a plant-based diet, so that was their motivation. But with dairy milk increasingly seen as dangerous, their plant-based alternatives started to seem more interesting to the rest of America.

• 14:38Speaker 00

  People had been looking into rice milk as a cow milk alternative. Soy milk also had a brief burst of popularity in Europe and the US in the early years of the 20th century. In an interview with the New York Tribune, Henry Ford said that not only would cars replace horses, but also milk from plants would replace milk from cows. He was right about the cars, at least.

• 14:57Nicola Twilley?

  Because in general, although these alternative milks were slowly starting to gain some attention, they definitely weren't mainstream, at least in Europe and America.

• 15:06Speaker 00

  Back in China, the original home of soy milk, there was an attempt to reinvent it. As we said, in the past, it had been either a seasonal treat or a food for sick people, but in the early 1900s, soy milk became something new.

• 15:18Speaker 06

  So I think the story of soy milk for China is really quite a modern one, because it is tied up with a very particular sense of being a modern nation and being a developed nation and one that is competitive with other nations around the world.

• 15:34Nicola Twilley?

  As dairy milk was being celebrated as the perfect essential food for infants in the West, China started to worry about its kids being left behind. But feeding infants soy milk seemed as though maybe it could be a solution. Here was this perfect food: milk, but with Chinese characteristics.

• 15:52Speaker 06

  So the, the medical establishment ends up sort of experimenting and trying to sort of evaluate what would the potential benefits be for infant feeding.

• 16:01Speaker 00

  Soy milk dairies got set up, first for infants, then for the rest of the family. It was sold on a subscription model. Like for dairy milk, you got home delivery and milk bottles at breakfast time.

• 16:09Speaker 06

  There's lots of advertising, for example, that's sort of foregrounded as something that the modern nuclear family, like this is an element of their daily life. You would have soy milk, and it comes in the morning. Suddenly, it becomes a food which is tied to certain, specific times of the day, certain meals in particular.

• 16:29Nicola Twilley?

  But just as soy milk was really taking off as a modern nutritious breakfast drink in China, the country itself fell apart. There was a decades-long civil war that, spoiler alert, the communists won, and Chairman Mao was not into soy milk. He threw all his energy behind setting up cow's milk dairies.

• 16:46Speaker 00

  In the US, the burgeoning plant milk industry also fell by the wayside once pasteurization was adopted. That killed most of the bacteria in milk, and also we got the cold chain and refrigeration, so milk didn't go bad as quickly. And we bred cattle that gave more milk, and we figured out how to feed them so they'd produce a lot of milk. Milk got cheap and safe.

• 17:05Nicola Twilley?

  And American dairies, which had really ramped up production to supply evaporated milk to their allies in World War I, once the war ended, they had a lot of milk to sell.

• 17:15Speaker 02

  What happens when, when you get into huge industrial things is this, then you have powerful marketing organizations to promote it. And so the milk industry really promoted the health of drinking milk.

• 17:29Speaker 00

  The government started distributing milk in schools, and in partnership with the dairy industry, they advertised how important milk was, how it would make kids grow big and strong.

• 17:38Nicola Twilley?

  And just like in China, drinking milk went from something for babies and kids to something adults should do too. The US government started recommending that adults should drink a pint of milk a day. Today, the advice for adults is a pint and a half.

• 17:51Speaker 00

  And those dairy industry campaigns kept going throughout the 20th century.

• 17:55Speaker 02

  I don't know if you remember Vince Lombardi, but he ran a pretty good football team, the Green Bay Packers, dominated football in the 60s. And he gave the secret of his success is that his players drank milk. And he said that, "I've never seen a great athlete that didn't drink a lot of milk."

• 18:14Speaker 00

  I don't remember Vince Lombardi, but I can still sing this jingle from my childhood.

• 18:42Nicola Twilley?

  Basically, by the middle of the 20th century, it felt like dairy milk had won. The plant-based milks, there was a moment back there in the early 1900s where it seemed like they could be a contender, but by the 1950s, they were back to being super niche. The story of plant-based milk's surprising comeback after this quick break.

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• 21:05Nicola Twilley?

  As we said, soy milk had fallen out of favor in mainland China, but then, after World War II, things started to change.

• 21:11Speaker 06

  Where we see soybean milk come in as like a popular industrial commodity that people go buy is really through, probably first through Hong Kong, like where it starts to move out scale. And that's like with Vitasoy, and then their operations moving into Southeast Asia and then more globally.

• 21:28Nicola Twilley?

  Strange but true, Hong Kong became the world's soy milk hotspot in the middle of the 20th century. What happened was a businessman got inspired by a talk an American nutrition expert had given about how soybeans were the milk cow of China. And during the 1940s, when Hong Kong was filled with wartime refugees, he launched a bottled soy milk company to help feed them.

• 21:49Speaker 00

  The company was called Vitasoy, and after the war, soy milk took off just as a normal drink you could buy in the supermarket, like a soft drink. By 1968, a quarter of all soft drink purchases in Hong Kong were Vitasoy. It was second only to Coca-Cola.

• 22:12Nicola Twilley?

  In the 70s and 80s, soy milk sales picked up throughout Asia, and Vitasoy started to be sold in Europe and Australia. It got to the US, too, and it caught on with one particular group: the hippies.

• 22:24Speaker 06

  Soy milk outside of China is something that is kind of tied up with counterculture and environmentalist movements.

• 22:33Speaker 00

  Soy milk was first sold in tetrapacks, those packages of liquids in the aisles that don't have to be refrigerated. Europeans are used to buying even cow's milk in packages like those, but Americans weren't.

• 22:44Nicola Twilley?

  There was a company called White Wave making soy milk in Boulder, Colorado, and the guy who founded it realized that Americans were never gonna see soy milk as a legit substitute for milk if it didn't have to be refrigerated like milk. So, starting in 1996, he paid supermarkets extra to have his Silk brand soy milk shelved right next to dairy milk in the cold.

• 23:07Speaker 00

  This is what helped soy milk take off when people saw it as milk. Another thing that gave soy milk a push happened a couple of years later. There was research that seemed to show that soy helped reduce LDL cholesterol, which is commonly considered the bad cholesterol. So soy and soy milk had kind of a health halo.

• 23:23Nicola Twilley?

  At that point, by the early 2000s, soy had really started to become standard. It was in nine out of 10 supermarkets. It showed up at Starbucks not long after. But it wasn't all smooth sailing for soy. There were some setbacks.

• 23:36Speaker 06

  Yeah, the biggest one is probably around the early 2000s, that some research suggested that it might be an endocrine disruptor, so that molecules are similar structured to estrogen. So maybe they're feminizing boys or, you know, causing problems with hormone levels in young women as well.

• 23:52Speaker 00

  Becky Ramsing is a registered dietitian and a senior program officer at the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future. But she told us, as scientists looked into this more deeply, it seemed like soy only had that effect if someone consumed truly unusually large amounts of soy milk or tofu, like in this one case study. Where someone ate something like, you know, eight times the average that's consumed in Asia, which is already high, like they were drinking multiple bottles of soy milk and eating multiple servings of tofu per day. Brent Kim is a public health scientist and Becky's colleague at the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future. And so you have these very rare, extreme cases of soy milk actually affecting hormone levels. But as I understand it, the evidence there is pretty weak that it actually has that effect.

• 24:33Speaker 06

  Correct. In fact, it's more the opposite.

• 24:35Nicola Twilley?

  In short, yes, soy does have plant estrogens. They're a lot weaker than our own estrogen, so they aren't going to give male soy drinkers boobs. But it seems that they may be doing enough to maybe help with some menopause symptoms, for example.

• 24:48Speaker 00

  Despite the nutrition back and forth, soy is amazing. Soy is horrible. In any case, soy was the first mainstream, popular, plant-based milk in the US. Started with soy, and then all the rage, really starting in like 2008, 2010. Almond milk really kind of crested and came to be the dominant force.

• 25:07Nicola Twilley?

  This is Mike Messersmith. He's now the CEO at Lasso Food Labs, but previously, he was the president of Oatly in North America. He said almond took soy's spot at the top in 2013.

• 25:18Speaker 00

  The issues with soy have tended to be, does it taste great? I mean, typically, when it's processed, it can have sometimes bitter and off-note taste profiles. Rice milk was another milk that was trying to solve this taste problem, though it never got quite as popular as almond milk did. But almond milk and rice milk, they also weren't perfect substitutes for milk.

• 25:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't think people realize what an incredibly complicated material that cow's milk is.

• 25:41Nicola Twilley?

  Julian McClements is a professor at the Department of Food Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

• 25:46Speaker 02

  It's got these fat globules in there, which are like fat covered by what's called phospholipids and proteins. And they were, make what, milk look creamy and give that sort of creamy mouth feel to it. So trying to replicate that structure is incredibly difficult using all plant-based ingredients, which are designed for a completely different purpose in nature.

• 26:07Nicola Twilley?

  The plant parts that are turned into plant-based milks, they also have proteins, and they often have fats, too, but they're just different. They're meant to store food for a growing plant, while milk proteins and fats are meant to feed a baby mammal.

• 26:18Speaker 02

  So you're trying to make something that is designed for one thing to do something that's designed for something completely different. So you have a different family of proteins in there, and they all have different surface characteristics. So it changes the way they interact with the surface of your mouth and the saliva in your mouth, and that changes their perception.

• 26:37Nicola Twilley?

  One of the only uses I have for milk is in tea and coffee, and that turns out to be one of the hardest environments for a plant-based milk to function.

• 26:45Speaker 02

  I mean, I'd be honest, I don't drink a lot of plant-based milk because I love tea and coffee, and they never behave very well in tea and coffee. Well, I don't think they do behave as well as dairy milk.

• 26:55Speaker 00

  Tea and coffee are pretty acidic, and they have chemicals in them that can interact with the proteins and fats in a lot of plant-based milks in a way that makes the milks clump up, which isn't pleasant.

• 27:04Nicola Twilley?

  And that's not the only way plant-based milks can let your caffeinated beverage down.

• 27:09Speaker 00

  We would go into coffee shops, a specialty coffee shop, that has gone to extensive lengths to source coffee beans, down to, you know, the exact location, the preparation with the farmer, a meticulous roasting process to get the perfect espresso with all these incredible tasting notes. And so you had people ordering almond milk espressos. And the deflation, the physical deflation that we would often see from baristas and these coffee roasters of, we went to all of this work to make this like amazing espresso, and yet now we're ordering a soy or an almond, you know, dairy alternative to go along with it for your cappuccino or your latte, and it doesn't foam right.

• 27:53Speaker 00

  It doesn't taste, it tastes with, you know, strange off notes. It's got a strange color.

• 27:58Nicola Twilley?

  The problem of making a plant-based milk that actually behaves as well as dairy milk does in coffee, this is the problem that Oatly launched as a solution to in the US in 2016. But that specific first-world espresso problem is not the issue that Oatly's founders were trying to tackle back when they got started.

• 28:17Speaker 00

  The Oatly story began back in Sweden in the 1990s. The company was founded by a scientist named Rickard Osti, and he had a lab where he and his brother were studying the intersection between the dairy industry and climate change. He saw the massive environmental problem cows were causing, and he started to think. We've built this giant, multi-billion, trillion-dollar industry off of this beverage, and is there a different way? And they kind of started by looking at, well, what are the sources of inputs, agricultural inputs, that could balance something that was good for the planet? Meaning, could it be grown abundantly in cold-weather environments, cover crop, low water usage, land usage, very efficiently?

• 29:01Nicola Twilley?

  Then they filtered by nutritional value. Cow's milk has a bunch of protein and calcium, but could you make a plant-based milk that was also full of nutrients, even if they're not exactly the same ones?

• 29:12Speaker 00

  So climate, nutrition, taste, meaning, is it neutral? Would it taste good in your cereal, in your coffee, et cetera? And then I looked across legumes and nuts and tree nuts and other grains like rice and really kind of galvanized around oat as a crop that could be abundantly grown, even in Sweden, where it's cold and dark at least half the year, and it rains a lot. Oat seemed like a fantastic option in a lot of ways, but the way oat milk was typically made, grinding up oats and boiling them and straining that mass to get a liquid, that was a fail on the nutrition front because the fiber gets lost. And so Rickard Osti developed a new process that uses enzymes to liquefy the oats entirely,

• 29:55Speaker 00

  which keeps a lot of the soluble fibers, and he came up with another process to turn that into a creamy drink. So well before any American had really ever said the word oat milk or thought the word oat milk, Swedes were hard at work in a lab, perfecting the art of making delicious oat milk.

• 30:14Nicola Twilley?

  And specifically, they developed a delicious oat milk that would work in specialty coffee drinks.

• 30:20Speaker 00

  On the barista edition oat milk, there is a very specific amount of fat where we tested, again, we have a meticulous Swedish product team where we sought to create a very specific balance of foaming capabilities and fat content to dial that in based upon hours and weeks and trial after trial with leading coffee barista experts in Europe and then ultimately in the United States to make sure we were nailing that. Oatly became popular in Sweden, and so then they thought, hey, America's a bigger market than Sweden. We want to save the world with our new plant-based milk. Let's try to see if we can convince Americans to drink it.

• 31:00Speaker 00

  And honestly, you look at oat milk, we always joked about like sampling and trialing the product of, you imagine walking down a grocery store with like a nice little old lady at the end of the aisle pouring like a tiny cup of a sample of something. We never did that with Oatly because you poured out of the carton, and it looks kind of like a strange gray.

• 31:22Nicola Twilley?

  Ish grage beverage sometimes. And you're like, this is not how we want anybody to experience this product for the first time. And let's avoid a tiny Dixie cup of just oat milk at the end of an aisle in a grocery store. And let's try to get them to experience the product through a latte at their local coffee shop, because that feels like a much more pleasant way to experience the product for the first time.

• 31:44Speaker 00

  So Mike and the North American team decided to make Oatly exclusively available to coffee shops. They hired baristas to be their sales team to make espresso drinks with dairy and Oatly side by side, so people could experience for themselves that Oatly behaved pretty similarly to dairy milk and a coffee drink. And it worked. Within a few months of their launch in 2016, Oatly was all the rage in trendy coffee shops in Brooklyn.

• 32:09Nicola Twilley?

  You'd be standing in line at the coffee shop and you would hear the barista who's cool and like knows what they're doing and has an awesome sleeve tattoo. And they would shout out oat milk latte for Mike. And I might be standing in line at that shop, ordering something else, but then I would like hear people say oat milk latte for Mike.

• 32:31Speaker 00

  And then people copied Mike and ordered an oat milk latte.

• 32:34Nicola Twilley?

  Eventually, some of those people wanted an alternative to dairy milk at home, too, but they couldn't buy Oatly at the grocery store. At first, you could only get it at just a few select coffee shops. They were asking the baristas, yeah, I want my latte, but also can I get four cartons to go? And we were totally, I mean, I don't know. Building these businesses, it's all different sorts of problems. At the beginning, you're terrified that no one, you'll like throw a party and no one will come. And then all of a sudden, it's like, oh, my gosh, all these people are at our party. We didn't order enough food. And so the problems shift pretty quickly. And we saw that within about the first six months of launching in the States.

• 33:15Nicola Twilley?

  What's even more bananas is that the people who bought those four cartons to go, some of them realized there were other people who were even more desperate for Oatly out there. And so people started reselling their Oatly cartons online for astronomical sums. My mom tried to buy it off of Amazon, and I think she paid like $86 for a carton of oat milk to be delivered to their house in Dallas, Pennsylvania in 2016. And she was, she was like, Michael, I thought like when your father and I buy the like the regular cow's milk at the grocery store, it's like five bucks. Is it supposed to cost that much?

• 33:50Speaker 00

  Not exactly. Since other people were suddenly making bank off cartons of oat milk, Mike and the team realized it was time to head into the stores. By 2017, Oatly had expanded into a few grocery stores. And then by 2018, you could get it at Whole Foods nationally, and the expansion continued.

• 34:07Nicola Twilley?

  At which point they started to face some competition. And you start to see some really big players come on the field making an oat milk, which is both incredibly validating and also extraordinarily terrifying.

• 34:20Speaker 00

  Nowadays, Oatly is no longer alone. You can find a bunch of brands of oat milks in the stores. Trobani has an oat milk, even Silk, the soy milk company, they have an oat milk.

• 34:28Nicola Twilley?

  But Oatly has continued to grow, and so has plant-based milk in general. More and more people are drinking these dairy alternatives, thinking that they're healthy and good for the planet. But are they? We've got the answers coming up after this break.

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• 36:15Speaker 06

  Plant-based milk is growing, and it's really become mainstream. I think it used to be kind of seen as a niche, but now it's really, I guess, 40% of households really have some kind of plant-based milk in their refrigerator or have tried it. So it's a growing and significant field.

• 36:31Speaker 00

  Oat milk is still chasing almond as the top seller in the US, but now there's far more available, not just soy, almond, and oat. Giraffe macadamia milk is by far the best plant-based milk out there. It's creamy, dairy-free, and delicious. There are lots of plant-based milks out there. Like we said at the start, you can find pistachio milk and hemp milk, and yes, macadamia milk.

• 36:53Nicola Twilley?

  Meanwhile, dairy milk has been on the retreat. It had about a century in the sun with Americans of all ages drinking more and more of it. But today, we drink about half the amount of cow's milk we did in 1975.

• 37:05Speaker 00

  There's a few reasons for that. One of them has to do with the perception that cow's milk has a bunch of stuff in it that we might not want to be drinking.

• 37:11Speaker 02

  Big industrial farms, they give hormones to cows to increase their production. And when, when cows get infections, they often get infections in their udders and things, and they give them antibiotics.

• 37:26Speaker 00

  And the fear is that those things show up in their milk, and so we're exposed to them.

• 37:30Nicola Twilley?

  But the main reason people switch away from dairy is a different health-related concern. Like we said, a lot of people are either allergic or intolerant to dairy. Lactose intolerance as an adult is the norm. Globally, more than two-thirds of adults are lactose intolerant, and in the US, it's nearly a third. And I can tell you, because Cynthia is among that number, that if you're lactose intolerant, chugging milk is a very unappealing option.

• 37:54Speaker 00

  Yes, it is. And then finally, there's a small but growing interest in vegetarianism or veganism. Some people opt out of meat and dairy because they think that plant-based is the healthy option. And some people are doing it because they don't think we should use animals for food at all, or because they care about the planet.

• 38:09Nicola Twilley?

  So these are the reasons people are choosing plant-based milk rather than cow's milk. And we wanted to know if it's really true that plant-based milk is healthier and/or more environmentally friendly. As it happens, Becky and Brent have just published a paper reviewing all the evidence on this.

• 38:25Speaker 00

  Becky focused on the health side of the equation. And to figure out how plant-based milk compares in terms of nutrition, first she looked at what cow's milk provides.

• 38:33Speaker 06

  Especially for children. Cow's milk is a vital source of protein and calcium and a lot of other nutrients that are important for growth and development, like vitamin D, magnesium, potassium, vitamin A as well. So for children, it's really important for growth, and it's significantly associated with height and weight and mineral bone bed density for kids who drink milk.

• 38:53Nicola Twilley?

  For adults, the benefits are a little more limited and harder to tease out from other lifestyle and diet factors.

• 38:58Speaker 06

  But it seems that, you know, people who drink milk and consume dairy products have lower cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes and heart attacks. Bone health, there's mixed evidence, you know, that if you have a, I think it's more related to having a healthy diet and having enough calcium in your diet, not necessarily from dairy. So those are some of the benefits, the biggest benefits of cow's milk dairy.

• 39:21Speaker 00

  As for the downsides of drinking milk, the hormones that cows are given, there was concern that that hormone might increase levels of another hormone in the milk that might contribute to tumor growth in humans. But this doesn't seem to be a serious issue. It seems like we're exposed to a very, very small amount of the hormone, and the contribution of that hormone to tumors, to cancer growth, is also small.

• 39:41Nicola Twilley?

  Meanwhile, when it comes to antibiotics and the idea that the antibiotics the cows are given are present in their milk, Brent says that should be a relatively minimal risk.

• 39:50Speaker 05

  You know, FDA does regulate and has pretty strict limits on how much antibiotic residue can be in milk.

• 39:58Speaker 00

  Okay, so cow's milk isn't a problem, and it's great for kids and totally fine for most of us overall, unless it's raw milk, in which case, good luck, that stuff can kill you, especially if you're immunocompromised.

• 40:08Speaker 05

  So there's, there's a reason why we pasteurize milk. It's to inhibit or destroy those kinds of foodborne pathogens that we don't want to be exposed to.

• 40:15Nicola Twilley?

  How about plant-based milks, though? What are their health benefits?

• 40:19Speaker 00

  Overall, there are some general benefits. One is that for people like me who don't tolerate lactose, well, it doesn't make us feel sick. But there are other nutritional benefits.

• 40:27Speaker 06

  One really interesting thing about plant-based milk is it's many categories because it depends on what the plant-based milk is made from. So that base ingredient is key to its nutritional characteristics, of course. There are bioactive compounds like isoflavones, phytosterols, some fibers even in some of the plant-based milks, which are important.

• 40:46Nicola Twilley?

  Oat milk, for example, can have good amounts of soluble fiber, the same stuff you get in whole grains, which is something Americans are generally not consuming anywhere near enough of.

• 40:56Speaker 06

  And generally, we know that a plant-based diet, a diet that's more plant-forward is healthier. You have lower heart rates of heart disease, diabetes, healthier weights from a plant-based diet. So having plant-based milks as part of a plant-based diet can be a, you know, we see better health impacts and health outcomes on the other side of it.

• 41:13Nicola Twilley?

  When it comes down to specific nutrients, dairy milk has a lot of protein, calcium, and vitamins, and that's where there are real differences.

• 41:21Speaker 06

  Your legume-based milks, like your soy milks and pea protein milks, are going to be very nutritionally similar to a legume or a bean. So you have higher, those are higher in protein, and the protein is more aligned with milk.

• 41:34Speaker 00

  Milks made of nuts or seeds often have vitamin E, but they're lower in protein.

• 41:38Speaker 06

  Generally, plant-based dairy alternatives are not going to meet the dairy requirements for calcium, vitamin B12, and vitamin B6. So those do have to be fortified.

• 41:46Speaker 02

  But then when you fortify it, and this is some of the work we've been doing as well, is you have to make sure it's bioavailable. So you don't just put calcium and vitamin D in there. You have to make sure that your body can actually break it down and absorb it.

• 41:57Nicola Twilley?

  Julian's found that in general, the calcium that plant-based milk companies add to their product is something the body can use. But he says the vitamin D can be a little bit more complicated. So in a fortified plant-based milk, you might not be getting everything it says on the label.

• 42:11Speaker 00

  That's overall nutrition, but then people have some specific health concerns. When it comes to Oatly, if you look at their ingredient list, there's some canola oil in it for creaminess. Some people think that canola is bad for you, but we debunked that in our episode about canola oil. It's not true.

• 42:25Nicola Twilley?

  Another concern you'll hear about plant-based substitutes in general is that they're ultra-processed.

• 42:30Speaker 02

  Sometimes they add things like caraginin, which is like it forms a shell around the proteins, and that stops them from aggregating. Or sometimes you add things like-

• 42:39Speaker 00

  Thickening agents like guar gum or xanthan gum, and that makes everything so viscous that things don't move up and down so much. So you don't see the separation.

• 42:48Speaker 06

  So you do need some of these enhancers or, you know, muslin fires to keep them stable. And so some of them do fall into the ultra-processed category because of that.

• 42:58Nicola Twilley?

  But, and we have a whole episode on this, it's called Nutrition Advice Decoded. The issue here is that ultra-processed is a very big category and lots of things in it don't actually seem to be a problem for our health. Silk soy milk and Doritos are not the same at all.

• 43:14Speaker 00

  Becky says that overall, if you're trying to figure out which is better for you, plant-based or cow's milk, it really depends how old you are and how much you're drinking.

• 43:22Speaker 06

  Well, I think that's the key. It depends on who you are. If you're a child and this is really your source of protein and calcium, then that makes a really big difference. If you're an adult and you're, you know, not, if you're getting enough protein in your diet and you're drinking milk because you like the flavor or you like the creaminess in your coffee, then it's probably not a big deal.

• 43:39Nicola Twilley?

  In other words, for pretty much everyone who's not a kid, if you're lactose intolerant or you're vegan, you're not missing out. But if you like cow's milk in your tea, like me, that's not an issue either, at least in terms of health.

• 43:51Speaker 00

  But when it comes to the environment, there are huge differences between plant-based milk and cow's milk. Yeah, so our choice of proteins has profound implications for planetary health, for climate crisis, for freshwater conservation.

• 44:07Nicola Twilley?

  One of the big issues with dairy milk is that cows burp. And their burps are filled with methane and methane warms our planet 30 times more than carbon dioxide ton for ton. These cow burps are a big part of the total greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture. And agriculture is one of the top five contributors to all greenhouse gas emissions.

• 44:26Speaker 00

  Long story short, cattle are major contributors of greenhouse gas emissions. And they're also outsized users of freshwater. And that's largely for thirsty feed crops like alfalfa, for example. Also, cows need a lot of land, both to live on and to grow the stuff we feed to them, like alfalfa and soy. So there's a lot of deforestation around the world that's caused by cattle farming. And then we can get into biodiversity loss and monocultures and all the harms associated with the feed crop production. And then we get into localized impacts to air, water and soil for the rural communities who might live next door to these sorts of mega dairies. So we could go on, but in short, the dairy industry as a whole is associated with a number of environmental impacts.

• 45:11Nicola Twilley?

  Meanwhile, for plant-based milks, yes, they are all different, but they actually are all the same when it comes to the most important issue of all.

• 45:19Speaker 00

  Broadly, in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, all of the data for the plant-based milks that we looked at showed a lower greenhouse gas footprint as compared to milk from cows, sometimes an order of magnitude lower. So when it comes to climate change, plant-based milks are all a winning choice. But like with health, different plant-based milks have slightly different environmental impacts. In terms of freshwater use, almond milk was the one that, depending on how we measure freshwater use, it could either be higher, lower, or similar to milk from cows.

• 45:53Nicola Twilley?

  This is an issue you hear a lot about in California, where I live and where all of America's commercially grown almonds are raised. All nut crops, including pistachios, are very thirsty and they have to be irrigated year round. And we just do not have enough water in the West in general these days. So that's a real issue.

• 46:13Speaker 00

  Outside of almond milk, all the other plant-based milks had a lower, what we call freshwater footprint, as compared to milk from cows. Becky's and Brent's study didn't look at pistachio milk or other nut milks. When it came to environmental impact, they looked at soy, rice, oat, almond, pea, and a couple of others. Also, they didn't look in depth at the land use issue in their study. But we can look elsewhere in the literature and see that, you know, plant-based milks also generally score better or score lower, lower being better in terms of other impacts such as land use and so forth.

• 46:44Nicola Twilley?

  So it's clear that plant-based milks cause less harm to the environment in almost all cases. In terms of environmental benefits, each plant-based milk is a little different. For example, oats are a cover crop that farmers can use in rotation to help keep their soils healthier. There are also benefits to growing soy and peas and other legumes because they have the ability to grab nitrogen from the atmosphere and pull it into the soil for plants to use to grow.

• 47:07Speaker 00

  From a climate perspective, a decent chunk of the greenhouse gas emissions from crop production comes from the application of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers. So if the plant is creating its own nitrogen, we don't have to rely on those same synthetic nitrogen fertilizers to grow those crops. So one would expect that the soy and the pea-based milks would generally have a lower greenhouse gas emissions profile. And they do. There are also differences in terms of how each plant-based milk is processed or transported. But overall, the difference among the plant-based milks aren't super dramatic when it comes to the environment. I mean, there is nuance and there are weeds, but I wouldn't want folks to get lost in the weeds.

• 47:50Nicola Twilley?

  Yes, legume and oat-based milks have extra benefits, but fear not if you happen to prefer almond milk. Basically, if you're drinking plant-based milks because you want to save the environment, you're doing the right thing. They're all better than industrial dairy milk in environmental terms.

• 48:06Speaker 00

  As someone whose body doesn't love dairy and as someone who does want to save the planet, I switched to plant-based milk a long time ago. But they're not always a great substitute for milk. We did an episode on vegan cheese and can definitively say that plant-based milk doesn't provide the same results, which is something that Julian is working on. What we want to do is be able, can you just take the plant-based milk and use it exactly the same as real milk? So that the manufacturer doesn't have to change any of their processes. They can just, instead of having real milk come into the factory, you just have a plant-based milk and you can still make cheese or yogurt or ice cream without having to change your process.

• 48:38Nicola Twilley?

  That would indeed be great, but don't hold your breath.

• 48:41Speaker 00

  So I think it could be another two or three PhDs in this area, but we just haven't got the funding to do it at the moment. Julian says that there's a lot of research still to be done on making plant-based milk that's even closer to cow's milk in terms of nutrition and taste and how it behaves in drinks and in recipes.

• 48:55Nicola Twilley?

  But in the meantime, Becky says that for most of us who are not kids and who are not downing gallons of the stuff on a daily basis, the decision of which milk to choose is not that big of a deal. You can just choose what works for you and what you like.

• 49:09Speaker 06

  And, you know, I like oat milk. It tastes really good in coffee. But I don't need the protein, you know, I'm not a growing child in a place in my life where I need a lot of extra protein.

• 49:18Speaker 00

  Mike obviously is an Oatly fan. He always keeps it in the fridge at home. But he's also excited about all the different plant-based milks that he sees in the grocery store today. Amazing. I hope they all succeed. And I think that that type of innovation only creates amazing products for people to buy

• 49:34Nicola Twilley?

  that create the change that we want to see.

• 49:39Nicola Twilley?

  Thanks. This episode to Wendy Foo, Mark Karlansky, Julian McClements, Mike Messersmith, Becky Ramsing, and Brent Kim. We have links to their books and research on our website, gastropod.com.

• 49:49Speaker 00

  We also have a special birthday shout out this episode to listener Jeff Clark. Happy birthday, Jeff, and thanks so much for the support.

• 49:55Nicola Twilley?

  And finally, thanks as always to our producer, Claudia Guy. We'll be back in a couple of weeks with another episode for your listening delight.

• 50:06Speaker 05

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