Orange County Register

One would think that the mad men (and women) who made milk cool with the “Got milk?” ad campaign would have an uphill struggle with their new project: Trying to sell the American public on the nutritional value of chocolate milk. But as it turns out, they’ve got some strong medical science on their side.

The National Dairy Council launched its $1 million campaign, called “Raise a Hand for Chocolate Milk,” with meticulous preparation. In addition to some quasi-celebrity moms (Rebecca Romijn, Angie Harmon) who praised chocolate milk in the ad campaign’s YouTube clip, several experts weighed in with their own justifications why choco should remain a staple of the school lunch menu: That kids wouldn’t drink white milk if choco were taken away; that all the same nutrients are present in both flavored and non-flavored milk; that studies show kids who drink flavored milk don’t gain any more weight, or ingest any more sugar or calories, in their overall diet than those who abstain.

But the heaviest hitter the campaign called off the bench was Dr. Robert D. Murray, director of the Center for Healthy Weight and Nutrition at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. He’s also chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Council on School Health, and in 2004 he authored the AAP’s policy statement condemning sugary sodas in schools.

“Pediatricians should work to eliminate sweetened drinks in schools,” he wrote then. Does this sound like a pro-chocolate and strawberry-milk treatise to you? But then he went on:

“This entails educating school authorities, patients, and patients’ parents about the health ramifications of soft drink consumption. Offerings such as real fruit and vegetable juices, water, and low-fat white or flavored milk (emphasis mine) provide students at all grade levels with healthful alternatives.”

Since that report is nearly six years old, I called Dr. Murray to ask him whether his views, or the views of the Council on School Health, had changed. The answer was no.

“The committee’s feeling is the same, that chocolate milk and other flavored milk represents a good nutritional option compared to almost any other option the child will select in its place,” he said.

Essentially, Murray said, the nutritional value children gained from milk outweighs the couple of teaspoons of sugar needed to make it palatable to a child. The same goes for other foods: Slathering carrots with ranch dressing or broccoli with melted cheese is acceptable if it means kids eat something they wouldn’t have eaten otherwise.

“I don’t want children to eat massive quantities of cheese, or salt or sugar,” Murray said. “But we’re allowed to have sugar in our diet, we’re allowed to have fat in our diet. It’s important for Americans to say, ‘If I eat saturated fat, I want something to be behind it that’s nutritious.’ ”

Caroline Steele, manager of clinical nutrition at Children’s Hospital of Orange County, agreed, saying that “when you look at childhood obesity, chocolate milk is not the problem.”

“Certainly, we know that lowfat milk is more nutritious than whole milk, and by adding chocolate we’re adding sugar,” she said. “But if they’re not drinking any milk, they’re not getting any of those nutrients. They’ve lost out.”

Some people aren’t buying it. The “renegade lunch lady” of Boulder, Colo., for one, disputes the notion that kids will refuse any drinks if they can’t get flavored, sugar-infused milk. Others say it’s simply counterproductive to offer a product with needlessly higher levels of calories and sugar. Still others say processed, pasteurized milk doesn’t belong on store shelves at all.

I bought three 8-ounce containers of Horizon organic prepackaged milk, the same size as the half-pint cartons common in schools: The chocolate had 180 calories, 5 grams of fat, and 27 grams of sugar. The vanilla was even sweeter, with 190 calories, 4.5 grams of fat and 29 grams of sugar. The regular reduced-fat milk had 120 calories, 4.5 grams of fat and 12 grams of sugar. Other kinds of flavored milk, like Nesquik, contain high-fructose corn syrup, which has become an enemy of nutritionists. (The 8.1-ounce container of ready-made Nesquik chocolate milk has 160 calories and 30g of sugar.)

I’m willing to accept Dr. Murray’s and Ms. Steele’s views, because they’re in earnest. But the ad campaign would be more credible if the dairy industry didn’t stand so much to lose (the Dairy Council says 54 percent of flavored milk sold is in schools), and if they could prove that there was a mass movement to remove it from menus.

Related posts:

• High-fructose corn syrup works to counter bad rap
• How to make a healthy school lunch
• Do helmet laws, free lunches make kids fatter?
• How much soda is consumed in O.C.?
• The states with the highest obesity rates

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