Kid's-Eye View
January 8, 2010
Debate!
Got chocolate milk? For schools across the United States, the answer might soon be no. Some nutrition experts are taking a stand against the sweetened dairy drink. Why? One 8-oz. serving of reduced-fat chocolate milk has nearly as many calories and sugar as a 12-oz. can of Coke. Encouraging students to regularly consume the drink, they say, contributes to unhealthy weight gain.
Public schools in Berkeley, California, and Boulder, Colorado, recently replaced chocolate milk with low-fat, organic white milk. "Chocolate milk. . . doesn't have any place in schools on a daily basis," says Ann Cooper, the director of nutrition services at Boulder Valley School District. If a kid chooses chocolate milk instead of regular milk every single day for a year, she says, he or she can gain about 3 lbs. because of the extra sugar and calories.
But the dairy industry argues that many kids would not drink milk if it didn't have the chocolate. "Flavored milk really fits two needs," says Ann Marie Krautheim of the National Dairy Council. "It meets kids' taste preferences, and it provides the nutrition that they don't get elsewhere."
As a National Dairy Council video on YouTube points out, "Chocolate milk is the most popular milk choice among children." Kids might find the drink delicious, but is it really nutritious?
What do you think? Does chocolate milk belong in schools, or not? Write to us at tfkasks4you@timeforkids.com. Your work could appear in a future issue of TFK.
