Hooray for Ann Cooper banning chocolate milk from the Boulder Valley School District. She calls it "soda in drag." To help improve regular milk consumption, Chef Ann makes it taste better without the sugar:
Instead of offering chocolate milk, she tries to make regular milk more palatable to kids. She ensures that it's served cold and not in those paper cartons that can sometimes smell bad.
As you can imagine, the dairy industry is going berserk. Over half of all flavored milk is sold in schools. When the dairy industry went before Congress last year, they asked Congress not to limit the amount of sugar they could put in milk. They said they wanted to sell flavored milk in schools and it doesn't taste good without lots of sugar.
My thought is: If milk requires chocolate to get kids to eat it, then should we give them carrot cake so they will eat carrots or apple pie so they will eat apples? Healthy food + sugar does not equal healthy food. Or how about skipping chocolate milk altogether and just giving the kids ice cream so they will get calcium that way?
In another article Chef Ann says even more. I think I'm going to hug her when she visits San Diego this winter. She totally rocks!
"For the National Dairy Council to be marketing to children and their parents by telling them that they have drink chocolate milk in school every day, thats the wrong message. And, in fact children don't need more milk they need more calcium," said Cooper.
Lunches in Cooper's cafeterias now have choices like brown rice, apples and a fresh salad bar along with regular milk.
Cooper says students can get additional calcium from foods like yogurt, cheese, white milk, leafy greens and garbanzo beans without drinking chocolate milk.
"No cow's udder when you squeezed it came out with high fructose corn syrup. So we need to get a grip here," said Cooper.
Avoiding the added sugar, often high fructose corn syrup, in chocolate milk is her main concern.
"Bodies actually don't metabolize high fructose corn syrup very well at all which is why its part of the cause of the obesity crisis and why we're seeing so many kids get diabetes because it messes with your insulin levels," said Cooper. [Emphasis mine]
She goes further in an article in Time, saying:
I'm all for parents having chocolate milk with their kids at home once in a while, or on Sunday morning with waffles, but it doesn't have any place in schools on a daily basis
Time, for their part, screwed up bigtime in their article by comparing banning chocolate milk to canceling Christmas in the first paragraph of the article. It's a nice attention getter for the article, but I think that goes under the category of "journalistic bias." Maybe the writer's parents didn't let him drink chocolate milk as a kid. |
