Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Should we ban chocolate milk from schools?

When I was a kid, I hated milk. It was a mostly irrational hatred, but the white stuff simply had no appeal to me. There were only two ways to convince me to drink milk: soda milk or chocolate milk. Now, facing the obesity epidemic, some are arguing that chocolate milk should be banned from schools. I will admit that cutting sugary drinks (i.e. soda and lemonade) from my diet did make a huge difference in my weight.

While milk has been the keystone of America's school lunches since the federally subsidized program was established in 1946, the role of chocolate (and other flavored) milk has become a focus of late following a 2006 rule that required schools to establish comprehensive "wellness programs." Public school districts in Berkeley, Calif., and Boulder, Colo. — two of America's more progressive towns — have removed the drink from their list of daily offerings, opting for low-fat, organic white milk instead. That's a perfect way to force kids to shun milk completely, says the dairy industry.
My own opinion is that banning chocolate milk is likely to backfire and cause kids to drink soda instead. That's what they really want, after all, thanks to persistent advertising. Thus, the kids are left without the nutritional value of milk entirely. But I am interested to see what Mod-Bloggers think.

5 comments:

CRCHAIR said...

I drink basically no milk now. I get all my calcium from cheese. I don't enjoy the taste of regular milk, but do get chocolate milk sometimes with breakfast.

A related thing is that it seems to be getting harder to find low fat chocolate milk at the grocery store. When we were in upstate NY, I could not fine low fat chocolate mild, so had water instead with my breakfast at the hotel.

shadowmom1 said...

I remember the chocolate milk being low-fat milk, even before it was fashionable. So, in one sense it was the healthier option. All white milk offered was whole milk in those days.

BH said...

We need to stop allowing the banning of things that "experts" believe is not good for us. This is a VERY dangerous path we are walking down.

Mrs. Bowhunter said...

Chocolate milk for me at a young age was a staple in my diet. I rarely drank soda and if I had the choice I went with chocolate milk. Through out my pregnancies I usually drank chocolate milk for the calcium and it tastes yummy. I agree with bowhunter, banning stuff is not good thing. But when was soda allowed in school in the first place? I never saw one vending machine in elementary school and even middle school there was one but it never worked. And if a parent wants to send the child to school with soda, then that's their call.

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