Kids Lose Taste for Milk When There’s No Chocolate Milk in School
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Fuse/Getty Images(SASKATOON, Saskatchewan) — To a lot of kids, chocolate milk is like the nectar of the gods. That’s why when Canadian researchers tested fate, they wound up with a mini-rebellion on their hands.
With the emphasis on healthier alternatives at school to combat childhood obesity, University of Saskatchewan researchers decided to eliminate chocolate milk in several elementary schools to determine if children would choose white milk instead.
In two words, they didn’t. Clearly, the school children were so upset by the abrupt absence of one of their favorite drinks that total milk intake dropped by a whopping 50 percent.
Even worse, there was no suitable food or beverage available at these schools that gave youngsters the same amount of calcium they need to build strong bones.
This put health experts in a quandary: while flavored drinks with higher sugar content had certain obvious drawbacks, they have yet to decide whether putting chocolate milk back in schools, due to its calcium content, is the lesser of two evils.
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