(s and j)
Though there are many differing explanations for why it’s happening, there’s no arguing that childhood obesity is on the rise in the U.S. The latest battleground over our kids’ waistlines is the school lunchroom, where nutritionists are attempting to make arguments for and against the continued sale of chocolate milk.
The L.A. Times talked to a pair of noted nutritionists on opposite sides of this debate.
On the pro chocolate milk side is Rachel Johnson from the University of Vermont, who says that chocolate milk is better than no milk at all:
When children don’t drink flavored milk, they are substituting it with other sugary beverages, including sodas and sweetened fruit drinks, so they aren’t getting any less added sugar, but they are getting a lot less essential nutrients…
If you are going to eliminate flavored milk and milk consumption is going to drop by so much, you are going to have to think about re-planning the whole school menu so you add those nutrients back.
And in the opposite corner is Marlene Schwartz from Yale University, who takes issue with the studies saying kids won’t drink milk at all if you take away the chocolate flavor:
Rather than working to decrease the amount of added sugar in flavored milk, the dairy industry seems more interested in funding studies to convince parents and food service directors that kids won’t drink plain milk. The data from the study that showed a 35% drop in milk consumption when there was no flavored milk in school lunches are unconvincing to me, because most of their observations came from school districts that sold white milk every day and only offered flavored milk on certain days each week. I am not surprised that more children purchased the flavored milk when it was offered. You would find the same thing if on some days you offered plain strawberries and on other days you offered chocolate-covered strawberries. Does that mean we should always offer chocolate-covered fruit to make sure that children get enough nutrients?
Here’s your turn to chime in:
Pro / Con: Should chocolate milk be allowed in schools? [ChicagoTribune.com]
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I have no problem with making school lunches healthier, but I do have an issue with people who suggest that school lunches, especially a single part of those lunches, like chocolate milk, are making kids obese. In North Carolina, a school year is 180 days. The only meals you can get at school are breakfast and lunch. Let’s assume that your average kid eats 3 meals a day, every day; that’s 1095 meals in a calendar year. When I was in school, most kids only ate lunch at school, and if that’s the case you’re getting 180 meals at school in a year, which is about 16% of the year’s meals. If a kid eats breakfast and lunch every day, they still only eat 360 meals at school a year, which is just 32 (almost 33) percent of their yearly meals. So this average kid eats 84% or 68% of all meals consumed in a year away from school. So…doesn’t it make sense that if a kid gets fat, there’s a lot better chance that the stuff he/she is consuming outside of school is the cause, not what he/she is eating in the cafeteria?
From personal experience, and from what I’ve seen in others around me, taking a food and putting a ‘special’ tag on it by making it a rare treat or banning it all together attaches special feelings to it or makes that food highly appealing.
For example, my mother-in-law. She has no self control what-so-ever. When she was growing up things like sweets and chocolate milk were rare special occasion treats where she went to school. As an adult she still holds on to those things as special treats and eats/drinks them to make herself feel better when she’s depressed, stressed or simply because she has the power to consume them any time she wants now that she’s an adult. Years ago while I was still in school she actually ate my, later to be, husband’s entire birthday sheet-cake all, but the two pieces that he and I ate, by herself in the span of 2 days. It wasn’t a small cake either and, in fact, was one of the larger sizes you can buy from a store. Her diets never last more than a week but she’s claims she’s on them for months. I’ll just leave it at ‘she is very very overweight’ and it’s not genetic.
As for myself, growing up I was given choices about what I ate. Eventually I tried new, healthier, things and preferred them of the less healthy options because I saw family members enjoying them. I was never told that I should like this or that because it was good for me. I was never forced to eat something that I didn’t like. I was allowed to grow into healthier flavors instead of being turned off to them for the rest of my life because after being forced to eat them before my palette was ready. Before I graduated high school I was picking out the healthier foods from the menu and taking plain white milk all on my own, without prodding, because I liked it more and I felt empowered in being able to chose for myself. I weigh 120lbs. My mom actually turned me off to alcohol for life using that method backwards. She found the worst tasting crap she could and let me taste a drop when I was about 10. I’m 24 now and I still can’t stand even the smell of alcohol in any strength and I simply can’t be around someone if they’re drinking as the smell makes me physically ill.
In making these foods special instead of giving them choices you’re only hurting these kids in the long run. Ultimately the weight of responsibility rests on the parents.
I’m pretty certain that if you go to anyone who is over weight because of choice instead of genetics you’ll find this to be true in most all of them.
Seemed to work on me. As a kid my grandparents always cooked delicious foods from their garden and it was all veggies. I think what got me into eating healthy was that I was growing so fast and was always extremely hungry. Like bottomless pit foaming at the mouth at the smell of a country dinner cooking in the kitchen. A cookie/ candy/ sweets did not cut it. I could feel it in my body that I needed nutrients. Why would someone want bad foods when they eat a colorful variety of fruits, veggies, dairy, and meats every meal? Maybe its just my taste buds or something.
The poll answers on this page are very skewed for a couple of reasons. Foremost being that the reasons kids didn’t get fat from decades of having chocolate milk at lunch (also considering school lunches USED to be more fattening) is because kids used to be more active, and have recess during school. Nowadays, kids come home from school, and sit down to play video games and watch TV. 20 years ago, kids came home from school, and went out to run around and be active for 4 hours.
THAT’S why kids didn’t get fat from sugary drinks back in the day.
I don’t know, maybe the dairy industry shouldn’t be so cozy with our public schools in the first place.
Yes, it is 100% better for you than drinking the empty calories of pop, plus it doesn’t destroy your teeth. If they remove chocolate milk, might as well remove pop from all school vending machines.
It’s called exercise. It’s called burning more calories than you take in. It’s called educating the students to that fact. You need many of the nutrients in choclate milk along with the other stuff in it. You also need calories to survive. Before you know it will have schools full of barfing anoerexic, weight obessed students looking like crack heads on the street because some nanny stater assumes they know better.
Yes
When parents stop taking their kids to Starbucks for 1500-calorie Frappucinos, then maybe we can stop serving chocolate milk. Until then, let’s all take a step back and realize it’s not things like chocolate milk making our kids fat.
Bubblegum-flavoured milk worked on me for a while in elementary school … until I (and everyone else) realized it tasted like crap. It quickly disappeared from the market.
Plus, screw chocolate — everyone knows that banana-flavoured milk is clearly superior.
Yeah they should introduce those ultra pasteurized milks in different flavors. Strawberry, banana, chocolate…
Laziness makes people fat, not chocolate milk.
Does milk have sugar added? I mean, I’m looking at my gallon of 2% (not chocolate) HEB milk and it says 11g of sugar/ cup.
I love chocolate milk. It’s one of the best post-exercise drinks there is. At the Olympics, they go through huge quantities of it.
this is real dumb I ate lunch food for years and did not get fat really this thing that these people have is false but whatever they wasting time and money and making things hard for everyone
In my experience, the milk at school had a seriously off taste — from sitting in a cardboard box, from sitting in the same cooler as all the other foods, from being transfered to the cooler where we get the milk at lunch (which is sitting open for the 2 and a half hours of three consecutive lunch periods). When there was no chocolate milk, a lot of the kids took water or went to the vending machines.
You can take the vending machines out, ban them from bringing their own drinks… but if you want them to drink healthy milk, make the chocolate milk healthier.
Wouldn’t it be easier to just tell the kids “This is what’s on offer for you, take it or leave it?”
We have to stop bribing the kids to eat healthy, because it’s creating a mentality that children will believe that they can eat only what they like, not what they are told to eat. If there’s no flavored milk, kids should suck it up and drink whats on offer.
I didn’t get to negotiate with my parents over milk or vegetables. Why should kids these days have the privilege of doing so?
Id say no
chocolate milk gives a kid the same calories as a box of milk + box of orange juice
its just too much :/
When I was in school, we got either chocolate milk or white milk. I think the chocolate milk was 2% (which is the type of milk I drank at home, albeit not chocolate flavored) and the white milk was either skim or whole. I don’t remember which one it was, but I remember one time I had to drink it because they had no chocolate milk and it was disgusting.
If they had 2% white milk instead of chocolate milk, I guess I would drink it. But if they only have the skim or whole white milk and nothing else, blech – forget it. I’ll just drink the tiny carton of orange juice. We didn’t have sodas – there were vending machines but they were locked up until after school.
Ideally, they should find a way to make chocolate milk without all the sugar/HFCS (or at least, less of it). I doubt kids will drink milk if it’s just plain white milk (regardless if it’s skim, whole or 2%).
I think milk is overrated. Nothing more than a dairy racket. I remember crying as a kid in elementary school because the dairy-funded “nutritionist” would make me drink milk even though I hated it. When my mom complained, they pretty much accused her of being a bad mother. He Will Conform!
chocolate milk in general isn’t a bad thing, if they’d do away with the varieties that have high fructose corn syrup in them. Make the chocolate milk with a small amount of real sugar, cocoa, etc, so that it’s at least healthier in content.
High fructose corn syrup doesn’t belong in anything we eat, and we need to get food manufacturers to stop using this waste product of a corn processing process, that they discovered is a cheap sweetener, which is bad for us because it fools the brain’s “i’m full sensor” into thinking we’re still hungry, so that we eat more than we should.
If you eat products WITHOUT HFCS in it, you eat less, because your “i’m full” sensor works properly, and you consume smaller quantities. I lost some weight just by cutting out HFCS from my diet and making an effort to watch portion sizes, not by changing anything else I ate.
Yes, especially since current research has shown there are health benefits to it.
http://www.webmd.com/fitness-exercise/news/20100604/chocolate-milk-refuels-muscles-after-workout
I’m ok with it. Besides, the nearby high school has a Pizza Hut and a Subway. What harm is a little chocolate milk?
Yes, definitely,
Kids do not get enough SUGAR in their diet yet……….
I miss school lunches. We had a great cafeteria, and I ate pizza pretty much every day. I also was on the football team and had a PE class. Therefore, I wasn’t fat (and I don’t have a high metabolism at all).
The reasons kids are fat:
1. Their parents are fat (good role models)
2. They sit on their fat asses and don’t do anything. Why? See number 1.
3. Their parents don’t tell them they need to lose weight. I mean, that would just break little Timmy’s heart. Timmy is 14, tell him to grow a pair and go outside.
Try this. Tell your kids the truth. If they decide they still want to eat bad food, be fat and eventually die from it, so be it, that’s there problem.
Believe me, the last thing making kids fat is school lunch. If parents are worried about their kid’s health, then they shouldn’t take them to McDonald’s every night for dinner.
I remember working with my mother in the church Sunday School program a few years ago. One girl (who was already pretty obese for a child) came in late with her breakfast. It was a McDonald’s breakfast meal (of course), and she ate what amounted to 1000 calories in a single sitting. I was flabbergasted.
This is why children are fat. Their parents don’t teach them good eating habits and aren’t buying decent food for their children. It’s hard for the schools to compete and offer relatively healthy food when kids have a taste for fast food and other greasy junk. It’s hard to please the masses and impossible to please everyone. The only way I’ve seen it work is for the school to offer two different main meals and several sides, so the students still have a choice. They can choose the pizza if they want, but they can also have a chicken sandwich or salad.
In schools, chocolate must be added to cover up the awful taste of the watered down rat milk. Adding black spots to a white rat does not make it into a cow, but to the schools, it does.