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While milk of any flavor contains nutrients necessary to healthy bone growth, such as Vitamin D and calcium, with childhood obesity on the radar of school administrators and dieticians, some districts are banning or cutting back on that cafeteria staple, chocolate milk. The dairy industry answered back recently with a media campaign promoting its benefits.
Students in a Barrington, Illinois district, which banned chocolate and strawberry milk from its elementary and middle school lunch menus, persuaded administrators to give it another chance. The district is serving chocolate milk on Fridays, only, and weighing whether the benefits of calcium and Vitamin D are worth the extra three teaspoons of sugar in each serving.
"Kids weren't drinking the white milk," said one 10-year-old. "It's better to have the chocolate milk than nothing."
Marlene Schwartz, deputy director of Yale University's Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, studied milk consumption in federally funded preschools across Connecticut that served only plain milk. She found that those young children drank it happily.
"What I don't understand is, when a child turns five and enters kindergarten, all of a sudden people think they will stop drinking plain milk," she said.
There may be reasons other than taste and sweetness that draw students to flavored milk. A young man from Altadena who attended public schools says, “The regular milk at schools is often spoiled. The chocolate milk is more popular, so it’s fresher.”
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