What Do You Think about Chocolate Milk in Schools?
What do you think about the new ad campaign promoting chocolate milk in schools? The campaign, which is sponsored by The National Dairy Council, stresses the nutritional value of lowfat chocolate milk and asserts that kids drink less milk when chocolate milk is taken away.
Meanwhile, those who oppose chocolate milk in schools say that flavored milk adds extra calories -- and therefore extra pounds -- contributing to the growing problem of childhood obesity. They say kids will drink plain milk when flavored is not available.
Is the answer balance? Some schools are experimenting with offering flavored milk only on certain days of the week. And in our family, I know that my son, for one, will rarely drink plain milk. To boost his calcium intake, I give him yogurt and cheese and calcium-fortified orange juice. And I also occasionally give him vanilla or chocolate-flavored milk. He doesn't eat much sugar otherwise, so I figure the occasional serving of flavored milk is worth any extra calories.
Call me old-fashioned, but I think that kids need to learn to appreciate the flavor of real foods and drinks, unadulterated by sweetening and artificial flavors. It sounds as if you are making good decisions for your son, but not everyone is so conscientious. School should be one place we can count on to foster good nutrition, not the place that sabotages parental choices by offering fat- and sugar-laden foods.
I absolutely adored chocolate milk when I was a kid in school. I would be so anxious in line waiting to see if they’d run out yet. It was sometimes the best part of my day. Of course, they didn’t have coke machines when I was in school and we didn’t have cookies, cake, potato chips and all that other stuff and my parents didn’t even allow us to have coke and other sweets at home. Desserts were for special times, holidays, family gatherings, etc. Nowadays, I guess I can see where it would just be one more dose of sugar in an already sugared-out society.
On a related issue, I’ve long wondered why the market makes it so difficult to include ordinary milk in the lunches of kids who bring their lunches to school. You can buy individual serving-size cartons of orange juice at the grocery store, and more and more often you can also purchase individual small boxes of soy milk and flavored milk, but the same-size containers of ordinary, unflavored milk are nearly impossible to find. I am about to start ordering the Horizon-brand 2 percent milk by the case online, but I have to ask why it’s so easy to find chocolate, strawberry and vanilla-flavored milk on store shelves but not the healthier choice of plain, reduced-fat milk.
In fact, I think I’ll blog about this myself today . . . .
I am surprised that, in this day and age, any of us fall for the propaganda from the Dairy Corporations that it is even necessary for children to consume cow’s milk.
Consumption of cow’s milk by humans has now been linked to juvenile diabetes, if you need yet another reason to rethink our
dietary habits.