Sugar: The Unhealthy Side Of Chocolate Milk

The National Dairy Council is launching a new campaign today - Raise your Hands for Chocolate Milk. The gist of it:

• Schools MUST keep chocolate milk available for children to choose at lunchtime.


• Milk is a much better choice nutritionally than sodas or juice.


• Chocolate milk has only 60 more calories than plain milk.


• Kids love it and will therefore drink more milk.

While this sounds great, there's a problem not addressed: Children are consuming too many calories from sugar. The additional sugar in flavored milk can add up to an extra 5 pounds of body weight over the course of a school year, says chef Ann Cooper, Renegade Lunch Lady of Boulder, CO.

So is this new campaign justified?

What you need to know:

Few people would argue that drinking milk instead of soda pop is a bad choice. And anyone who has children knows that their attraction to sweet is like a magnetic force. So if adding some sugar and flavor is the vehicle to get children drinking milk, it makes sense that we all raise our hands for chocolate milk.

The question then becomes, how much added sugar?

Would you add over 3 teaspoons of sugar to your child's 8 oz cup of milk?

Probably not. But that's exactly the amount being added to kids' chocolate milk.

We asked Karen Kafer, RD, VP Health Partnerships at National Dairy Council, about all that added sugar. She responded that in market testing conducted by the milk manufacturers, the 3 added teaspoons seemed to be the magic number that got kids to drink the most milk. She did not disagree that less sugar would be better, but added that right now that's what manufacturers are selling because that's what kids like.

The problem for many parents is that once kids get used to sweet, it's hard to get them back to "un-sweet". At home they may be used to drinking plain milk, or very lightly sweetened milk at breakfast (flattened teaspoon of Nesquik anyone?). But once they start school and get a daily fix of super sweet chocolate milk, they'll demand the same at home.

So here's a challenge to the National Dairy Council - work with the processors of flavored milks to schools and get them ALL to agree to a gradual reduction in the sugar content of their products. Maybe not overnight, but in the course of a year or two, they can easily cut those 3 teaspoons of sugar down to one. Everyone wins -

1. Children will be getting an even healthier product without even noticing a taste sacrifice


2. Manufacturers won't lose market share because all of them will be taking this step at the same time


3. The National Dairy Council will earn extra credit for promoting a holistic nutrition approach, not just milk

And one more request to the manufacturers - although chocolate milk has no artificial colorings, the strawberry milk does. Red 40 has been associated with hyperactivity in children and is being phased out in the UK. Please, please remove it from your products and use natural colors instead.

What to do at the supermarket:

As a matter of practicality, buying prepared chocolate milk is very convenient. However the Yoo-hoos of the world are extremely sweetened. One option is to mix it with regular milk to lower the sugar content. Another is to buy the powders or syrups and control how much you add to each glass of milk.

 

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Comments

[SugarAssociation]

Sugar in chocolate milk is not the enemy here. To put this proposal into perspective, you’re talking about a measly 2 teaspoons of sugar—or about 30 calories, which would be burned off in 15 minutes of Physical Education. If anything, sugar helps boost milk consumption in schools and helps children get essential vitamins. We need to teach our school children that healthy lifestyles involve consuming natural products with natural, filling calories and exercise to balance the consumption of those calories.

[Hemi Weingarten - Huffpost Blogger]

It's not 2 teaspoons of sugar. It's MORE THAN 3. For a small 8 fl oz serving.

What we really need is to stop having the Sugar Association weighing in on what's healthy for kids.

[khanti]

Children can tolerate the sugar content in drinks as they are active and has a high metabolism rate provided they don't over consume.
Do you know there is fruit that is hundreds of time sweeter than sugar minus the calories. Full of antioxidents and is antidiabetic to type 2 diabetes.
Used in China for centuries as a sweetener and as a cough remedy as well. No side effect has been noted. The fruit is luohanguo(­scientific name siraitia grosvenori)

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17349091

[Cassandrawept]

Chocolate milk provides iron and milk nutrition. The kids can stand 60 calories. My whole generation drank white and chocolate milk. But not soda and fake-o fruit juices. And we had plenty of run around time outside, time most parents are too lazy and "too busy", to provide now.

[GiovaBocca]

To the sugar content of chocolate milk you have to add the starch emulsifiers added to thicken the product. The thickening prevents the cocoa from settling out of suspension and forming a sludge at the bottom of the container. The body converts the starch of the emulsifiers to additional sugars, and additional fat. The starch content also displaces milk, which lowers the percent of the beverage that is actual milk.

[xstevejx]

May as well be arguing against serving milk at all!