The unhelpful, distracting debate about whether oat milk is bad for you totally misses the point.
Is oat milk good or bad for you?
That’s the question a bunch of recent news headlines have asked. I really hate that question.
Obviously, how the food we eat affects our health is very important. But most foods — including nondairy milks — are not universally good or bad for everyone. Whether or not oat milk is bad for your health depends on a lot of things: your current body condition, the context in which you’re consuming it, and how much of it you’re drinking, to name a few.
“Simple ‘good or bad’ stories about traditional milk or nondairy milks, such as oat milk, often overlook the complexity of nutrition,” Hassan Vatanparast, a professor of nutrition at the University of Saskatchewan who has studied non-dairy milks, told me over email.
This healthy/unhealthy dichotomy also obscures a much more complicated set of factors that determine what we eat. For many of us, health is high on that list. But so is taste, cost, presence of allergens, and environmental impact. We live in a time that begs us to think beyond ourselves, beyond our bodies, and to recognize that what we eat affects the world around us — often in very serious ways.
So, what should we drink? That question has been gnawing at me, and so I read some things and talked to some experts to try to figure it out.
If you’re a healthy person, a daily oat milk latte is not a problem
Many recent stories about oat milk raise concerns about the drink’s effect on blood sugar — more specifically, that it causes a spike in blood sugar following consumption. So let’s start there.
Repeated spikes in blood sugar (i.e., a fast build-up of glucose in your blood) are famously not good. It’s linked to cardiovascular disease and insulin resistance, a precursor to diabetes. What does oat milk have to do with it? It’s higher in starch (a carb) than some other nondairy milks, and starch is converted into simple sugars when you digest it. That raises your blood sugar. (This conversion of starch to more simple sugars also happens when oats are processed into oat milk, which is why oat milk often tastes somewhat sweet, even if sugar isn’t listed as an ingredient.)
But it’s normal for food to raise your blood sugar, especially if that food is a processed grain. For most people, that won’t be a problem. If you’re healthy and not loading your diet with starchy carbs, you should have no problem regulating your blood sugar after a cup of oat milk and bringing glucose levels back down after a spike. To be clear, oat milk is not a sugary drink like, say, soda.
Going a bit deeper: Nutritionists use a rating system called the glycemic index to measure how quickly different foods raise our blood sugar (which is different from just the total amount of sugar in something because different kinds of sugar have different effects on blood sugar — it’s confusing). In general, oat milk has only a “moderate” glycemic index, Vatanparast told me. That means it’s not particularly bad for blood sugar or particularly good.
I asked the oat milk company Oatly about this, too. The company’s nutrition specialist, Kate Twine, said that its popular Barista Edition, which is slightly fattier than regular Oatly, has a medium glycemic index. If you factor in the serving size (e.g., one cup), using a related measure called glycemic load, the blood sugar profile is even better — the glycemic load is “low,” she said.
One somewhat obvious takeaway is that the amount of milk (and thus carbs) you’re drinking matters. What you’re consuming with it matters, too. Foods high in fiber, protein, and fat can blunt the impact on blood sugar because they slow down the absorption of glucose. (Cow’s milk has a lower glycemic index than oat milk and other nondairy milks, but a more comparable glycemic load. Rice milk, meanwhile, has a very high glycemic index and load. The bottom line: A cup of oat milk is probably not going to be a problem for blood sugar.)
But there’s an important caveat: For people with diabetes or insulin resistance, glucose — and the presence of starchy carbs — obviously matters a lot more. “If you have diabetes, oat milk may not be the best option since it’s one of the higher carbohydrate-containing milk substitutes,” Marion Groetch, a registered dietitian and director of nutrition services at Jaffe Food Allergy Institute, a division of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, told me. But if you’re not diabetic and otherwise eat well, Groetch said, there’s not much of a concern with having an oat milk latte every day.
Some other health-related considerations:
- Oat milk tends to be lower in protein, compared to dairy and soy milk. But you probably don’t have to worry about that.
- These milks are typically higher in fiber and lower in fat than dairy and some other nondairy milks, such as coconut (assuming you avoid full-fat options or those with added sugar).
- Additives like rapeseed oil and emulsifiers (which essentially prevent the ingredients from separating), common among nondairy milks including oat milk, are generally recognized as safe by national and international health authorities, Vatanparast said.
- That said, there’s some research linking emulsifiers — and especially synthetic emulsifiers like carboxymethylcellulose and polysorbate 80 — to potentially harmful changes in the gut microbiome. The real-world implications are not clear or well-tested. The studies I read suggest that there aren’t serious safety concerns with the emulsifiers used by popular oat milk brands (I reviewed several), such as gellan gum, though more research is needed.
So, where does that leave us? Drinking oat milk is probably fine for your body unless you’re drinking large quantities of it, already loading your diet with carbs, and/or diabetic. If most of your day’s liquid is coming from any milk, plant-based or not, that’s probably not great. Moderation is key.
The other reason why you might consider a milk “good” or “bad”
Now is a good time to mention: I’m not vegan, I occasionally eat dairy, and I don’t really love any of the nondairy milks. They’re all kind of eh. But I typically choose to consume oat and soy milks because they taste good enough in coffee and cereal, I can afford them, and, importantly, it’s an easy way to support the welfare of cows and reduce my carbon footprint.
That’s another reason why I find the “is it good vs. bad for you” debate over oat milk kind of icky: It distracts from these other important considerations, catering instead to the public’s desire for simple, comfortable answers. I want choosing something as basic as milk to be simple, but it’s not.
My personal perspective is that I like cows, and the treatment they receive at a typical dairy seems, at best, unkind. Farmers repeatedly impregnate cows and take away their calves right after they’re born. If those babies are male, they are usually turned into veal or raised for beef. If they’re female, the calves are typically dehorned and docked, and also eventually slaughtered (when their milk production wanes). I’m having trouble imagining that this is a happy existence.
I’m also aware that, globally, a liter of dairy milk produces around three times as much carbon emissions as the same amount of plant-based milk. Cows release methane, a potent greenhouse gas, through their burps and manure. The chart below, drawing on a 2018 study from the journal Science, is especially revealing. It shows that nondairy milks — and especially oat milk — not only release fewer emissions but also require less land and water. They tend to pollute less, too. (Growing feed for cows requires a lot of land, fertilizers, and pesticides.)
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I don’t mean to imply that avoiding dairy is an easy choice. It requires wrestling with the pain that a declining dairy industry would cause. I’ve met loads of farmers in my career as a journalist (and before that as a researcher), and it’s clear to me that they love their animals. Many of them are also working to reduce their emissions. Farming families also obviously make their living from consumer demand for dairy products (just as other farmers make their living from growing plants). The growing popularity of oat milk is a threat, and one that a powerful dairy lobby is trying hard to eliminate.
I don’t live under the delusion that by not drinking dairy I live a cruelty-free life. No such life exists. The coffee I put my milk in likely comes from land that’s been cleared of forests (once home to a more abundant array of wildlife). The cafes I go to use plastic lids. My clothes come from oil (nylon) and industrial fields of cotton. It’s a nightmare!
Nonetheless, I’ll probably continue opting for plant-based drinks. Drinking oat milk is not obviously bad or good, but relative to other ways I can help out, it’s easy. I’m increasingly aware — I almost wish I wasn’t — that choosing to buy dairy is choosing to cause harm to farm animals, wildlife, and our planet.
Trump’s inevitable romp to victory in Nikki Haley’s home state reveals how strong his hold on the GOP is — and how dangerous he remains to democracy.
Tonight, in the South Carolina Republican presidential primary, Donald Trump defeated rival Nikki Haley in her home state. Ordinarily, this might feel like big news, as the Palmetto State tends to host one of the most important early contests. Joe Biden’s 2020 victory in the state, after dismal finishes in Iowa and New Hampshire, is one of the biggest reasons he’s president today.
But the vote feels irrelevant: The 2024 Republican primary isn’t and never has been a competitive primary. Trump simply wasn’t going to lose a contest for the hearts and minds of the Republican base. Ideologically, psychologically, even spiritually — it’s the Trump party through and through.
I and others have been arguing this for years now. Yet during those same years, many prominent people in politics and the media deluded themselves into thinking he might be dethroned. They have been wrong every time and continued to be wrong long after the strength of Trump’s grip on the GOP could not be denied.
There’s a lesson to be learned from this track record of failure, one deeper than just “Republicans really like Donald Trump.” Trump’s persistence tells us something critical about the nature of the current Republican party — and why it’s become such a danger to American democracy.
How Trump keeps wiggling his way out of jams
Ever since the early stages of the 2016 GOP primary, the same pattern has repeated itself over and over again: Some new development that looked politically dangerous for Trump ends up not mattering at all. This happened so many times in the 2016 election cycle alone that it became a running joke during the campaign.
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@BronzeHammer
The pattern continued through Trump’s presidency, and most strikingly after January 6 — when Trump managed to maintain majority support in the Republican party after inciting an honest-to-god insurrection. At that point, you’d think it would be obvious that Trump was going to cruise to renomination in 2024. Yet somehow, the delusions of a Trump collapse persisted.
During the January 6 Committee meetings in summer 2022, there was widespread speculation that the dramatic public hearings had weakened Trump’s hold on the GOP. Republican primary voters proceeded to disprove this theory by booting the House members who voted for his impeachment and nominating full-MAGA election deniers, like Arizona’s Kari Lake, to contest key swing races around the country.
These candidates performed poorly in the 2022 midterms, while Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis cruised to reelection. This led many observers to see DeSantis as a possible Trump killer, with some going so far as to anoint DeSantis the frontrunner in early 2023. Soon after that, DeSantis’s poll numbers collapsed.
After the DeSantis train crashed, Trump skeptics crowned Haley the next anti-Trump Republican hope. She secured critical funding from Americans for Prosperity Action, the political arm of the Koch empire, in November — raising the Haley hype to surprising heights going into 2024. In mid-January, prominent pundit Jonathan Rauch gave Haley roughly a 40 percent chance to win the primary, adding that “the odds might shift in her favor quickly.”
Then she lost by double-digits in her supposed stronghold of New Hampshire, and the writing was on the wall in great big bold letters.
None of this speculation tracked Trump’s poll numbers. The former president consistently led in the polling averages, generally by wide margins. So why did so many get this so wrong?
Sometimes, the explanation is mundane wishcasting: centrist or anti-Trump Republicans desperately wishing to avoid a choice between a threat to democracy and a Democrat. But in some cases, there’s a more interesting explanation — that even some of the GOP’s critics didn’t fully appreciate what it had become.
New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait, one of the more perceptive of these critics, was an early booster of DeSantis’s chances. In August of last year, he admitted that he had gotten it wrong — and wrote an interesting column trying to explain why he erred. Chait’s basic argument is that Trump’s cult of personality was far more powerful than he had appreciated.
“Defeating Trump in a contest determining who can most effectively advance ideological or party goals is difficult but attainable. It is obviously impossible to defeat Trump in a contest of who is most loyal to Trump,” Chait concluded.
This is surely a key part of the story. But it also raises a more fundamental question that Chait doesn’t attempt to answer: Why does the Republican base have such unwavering faith in the man?
Trump’s celebrity charisma alone isn’t enough of an explanation. Otherwise, former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger would bestride the GOP like a colossus. Nor is Trump’s fawning coverage in the conservative media. Fox News has repeatedly tried to turn the Republican base away from Trump and toward figures like DeSantis, only to have to kiss the ring when the voters didn’t follow their lead.
The answer, at least as far as I can tell, is that Trump’s cult is the product of his unique ability to channel the cultural grievances at the heart of the current Republican party.
Again and again, social scientists found that the best predictor of Trump support among Republican voters is the degree to which they feel discomfort with the changing nature of American demographics and social norms. Trump has sold himself as the only person capable of fighting back against the alleged elite conspiracy behind these changes, saying things like “I alone can fix it” and “I am your retribution.” From these building blocks, he has created a full-scale political movement dedicated to reconquering America.
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Scott Olson/Getty Images
Trump’s appeal isn’t premised on delivering concrete policy goals, nor even “owning the libs” with high-profile stunts. It is about assuaging the sense of fear and resentment at their America being replaced: about achieving victories that assuage the sense of psychological assault created by things like mass immigration, a Black president, shifting gender roles, and a beloved beer brand cutting an ad with a trans influencer. Donald Trump, as a figure, represents the America they know and love. His victories are their victories, his defeats their defeats.
This frame helps us understand why Trump can’t be beaten inside Republican politics. It also clarifies why Trump has been able to steer the Republican party so harshly against democracy.
By making his very person into a stand-in for the existential struggle for America’s soul, he has created a world where any loss represents an intolerable blow against everything good about the country. Such a setback can only come from a place of deep corruption — from the Swamp and “Democrat-controlled cities.” And if American democracy has truly been subverted this thoroughly, the logical conclusion is clear: We have to “fight like hell” to save it.
The South Carolina primary’s irrelevance points to this deeper and darker story. It is one we must wrestle with in order to truly appreciate the stakes in the coming general election.
Update, February 24, 7:30 pm: This article was first published on February 24, 2024, and has been updated with the results of the South Carolina primary.
Virtual learning means missing out on a different kind of education.
We had many superstitions when I was a kid. Wear your pajamas inside out. Or wear your underwear on the outside of your PJs. Gargle a bit of saltwater right before bed. When you put your shoes away, make sure they’re backward; left shoe on the right-hand side, right on the left.
Our teachers would remind us of these tricks during the school day before a potential snowfall. That night, we would all do our part, hoping and praying that we’d awaken to a sheet of fresh snow, deep enough to render our schools closed for the day.
On those mornings, we’d wake up earlier than usual to stare at the local news channel, filled with anticipation as the names of all the local school districts drifted across the screen, anxious to see our own listed among the lucky ones.
If a snow day was announced, it was pure elation as we rushed to get our winter bibs and boots on to go out and play in the fresh snow, joining our friends and neighbors for sledding or snowballing or snowman building. We’d return home after a few hours for hot chocolate and soup before putting on dry clothes and heading back out again.
Growing up on the Jersey Shore, we rarely had to endure very snowy winters. But each year, we could count on at least one or two snow days minimum. Sometimes, like the great blizzard of ’96 — which, at one point, rendered the whole of the New Jersey Turnpike closed — we’d get entire stretches of days off to play in our sudden winter wonderland.
Of course, back then we didn’t have access to the internet like we do now. We couldn’t be in class from the comfort of home.
With the proliferation of virtual learning, do kids even get to enjoy the magic of an unexpected snow day anymore? Are true snow days an endangered species?
Earlier this month, nearly 1 million students in New York City’s public school system learned that their schools would remain open, despite the threat of a predicted half-foot of snowfall (in the end, estimates ended up being a bit high, with John F. Kennedy International Airport reporting just over 4 inches of accumulation). Classes would be held virtually, they were told — even though there was a network outage that prevented smooth proceedings. There was plenty of pushback, even including some reports of teachers telling parents to ignore the edict from Mayor Eric Adams.
But the point remained: Access to virtual learning was robbing kids of one of the premier highlights of youth (at least in those geographical sweet spots like New Jersey, where snow falls sometimes in the winter).
Adams’s comments that New York City had to “minimize how many days our children are just sitting at home making snowmen,” completely disregarded the social needs of a generation of overworked and overstressed children.
Because there’s nothing wrong with a day or two spent sitting at home, making snowmen. At least not according to Melanie Killen, a professor of human development and quantitative methodology at the University of Maryland.
“Snow days need to be sledding days,” she said. Snow days offer “a different kind of learning … an important kind of learning.”
I spoke with Killen a few days after those inches of snow blanketed New York City, wondering what effect the growing loss of snow days has on school-aged children. I suggested snow days offer students something of a brain break from the regular grind of school-based learning. Killen was quick to correct me.
“I wouldn’t necessarily call it a ‘brain break,’” Killen said. “Kids are out there using their brains in different ways on snow days. It’s a break from the traditional teacher-children dissemination, which kids need.”
Killen likened the typical snow day of the past to something like an extended recess, highlighting how during that less structured playtime, kids continue to learn. She added that almost everything about playing in the snow offers some sort of quantifiable lesson about the world.
Killen described how throwing snowballs was like a lesson in physics, how sledding involved implicit mathematics, and how even the very snow itself provided children with a sense of material understanding. After all, anyone who’s ever played in the stuff knows exactly what kind of snow makes the best snowballs.
These more free-form social settings also allow children to learn how to interact with other people in the world, how to infer intentions and expectations, and how to learn about fairness, morality, and justice. This is known as social cognition, which, according to the American Psychological Association, is the way “people perceive, think about, interpret, categorize, and judge their own social behaviors and those of others.”
According to Killen, free-form interactions, like those on a snow day, are prime real estate for the development of social cognition in children.
Going virtual on snowy days “undermines the power of peer interactions, which are fundamental for contributing to change and development,” Killen said.
To contest Adams’s point: When children are making snowmen, they are absolutely learning.
Where I live now in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Andy Jenks is the name people anticipate hearing on a snowy weekday morning. As the chief communications officer for Chapel Hill/Carrboro City Schools, Jenks is the guy on the prerecorded voice message telling us whether or not our schools are closed for the day when snow falls or ice accumulates. Jenks has become such a legend among the local high school kids that homemade signs sporting Jenks’s face were held high above the student section at the recent Chapel Hill/East Chapel Hill rivalry basketball game.
But while Jenks may get all the praise (or disdain, depending on the nature of the voicemail), the decision on whether or not to close schools is not his. Rather, it’s a decision made by the school system’s superintendent after being informed by what Jenks calls the system’s “operations team.” After observing weather reports and taking a look out the window on a snowy morning, that team makes a suggestion to the superintendent, who then has the final call as to whether or not schools will be closed for that day. Some version of this is standard protocol for most school districts in America.
“Generally speaking, it comes down to safety,” Jenks said. “If we believe we can safely transport kids to school and if our staff can safely transport themselves to school … then we can have school. But if things call safety into question — an accumulation of snow or ice, wind, or other factors — at that point … [we might] close school altogether.”
Jenks also points to local and regional infrastructure as a pivotal factor in the decisions to keep schools open or closed. And while everyone loves to dunk on how the South handles snow, it’s important to remember that places like ours simply aren’t armed with fleets of plows and salt trucks. It can sometimes take days to clear every road in town.
Considering as much, if a small portion of the student body lives on roads that can’t be plowed, the whole of the student body gets a snow day.
“No one is going to get left behind on account of the weather,” Jenks said.
There’s also the question of what’s become known as the digital divide: the socioeconomic gap between those who have reliable access to computers and the internet and those who don’t. For a relatively wealthy school district like Chapel Hill/Carrboro, where each middle and high school student gets a school-issued laptop, it’s less of an issue. Some studies have estimated that as many as 12 million kids across America lack sufficient access to reliable internet access. Some school districts, like Chapel Hill/Carrboro, have taken to sending some students home with wifi hotspots when extended closures are forecast. One district in Wisconsin has even experimented with using drones to deliver connectivity.
In many ways, it’s simply easier for the district to cancel school on a snowy day.
Sadly, the students of Chapel Hill/Carrboro City Schools haven’t heard Andy Jenks’s prerecorded voice telling them they have a sudden day off due to snow in some time. It’s been 764 days at the time of this writing. It’s a number Jenks hopes will soon reset to zero.
“All of us used to be kids and we do appreciate the enjoyment of a good old-fashioned snow day on a fresh winter morning,” he said. “We still believe that kids should have that experience.”