Tiffany utilized a "Come and Take It" sign while introducing an amendment that would ensure children retain "access to delicious and nutritious" flavored milks.
Delicious nutritious processed sugar! That's right this highly refined white powder that can't be found in nature is the healthiest thing you can eat! Buy it by the 5 pound bag and put it in everything. Put it in your morning coffee, your morning pancake, cover your morning bacon in it, and don't forget to dip that apple you eat every day in caramel! Make sure your lunch is covered in ketchup, which is also loaded with sugar for your convenience. Go ahead and have that milk shake too!
It’s particularly high fructose corn syrup that’s real bad. I forget the specifics but the balance of fructose to sucrose is important to how our body processes it.
Oh, and the rest of the nutrients in fruit help slow the digestion of the sugars and mitigate some of the bad effects. But if you extract the sugar, it’s not so healthy for you anymore.
Yeah, thanks to all that marketing people even still think that milk is good for you (lol), even chocolate milk (rotflmao). Absurd. It's too bad that market forces have so much influence over everything, including notions about what constitutes health.
The USDA wanted to ban flavored milks from elementary schools and limit the amount of said milks within high schools as part of a wave of new nutrition standards.
I think this is the only data the congressman and his milk industry lobbyists cared about:
According to the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, removing flavored milk from schools resulted in a 62% to 63% reduction in milk consumption by kids in kindergarten through fifth grade, as well as a 50% reduction in sixth to eighth grades.
Basically, ban flavored milks and children will drink less milk, which means less money for big milk, which is why this is a thing.
when i was in school, chocolate milk was only available one day a week (usually fridays). sensible meal planning by the schools to limit the extra sugar intake without 'needing' a law to do it. we didn't have vending machines either, i was out of k12 before that trend took off.
and yea, i can see a '50% reduction' in milk consumption--but only on those days. a lot of kids (including me) bought an extra carton or two (at 5 or 10 cents each back then) when chocolate milk was on the menu, because a little 8 ounce carton of chocolate milk is like a single swig.
Well, of course his motivation is Big Milk, that was never in dispute.
Milk does have excellent nutritional value. A reduction in milk consumption is also a reduction in some vitamin and protein intake. It could be that increasing milk consumption is good for his constituents, and milk consumption is good for the students health. Both things can be true at the same time.
I'd like to see what the data is on flavored milk specifically. Kids need to drink SOMETHING, and I'm curious if the alternative is better in the long run than chocolate milk.
What's a good alternate drink to offer kids (other than water)? You don't NEED milk of course, but the goal is to provide nutrition and something they will actually eat/drink.
If our schools were not captured by business interests, they ought to be doing things to actively discourage kids from drinking milk. Unfortunately, we still have so many adults that think milk is a health drink. But that's the idea of the captives held in schools.
so weird. i'm a conservative christian. i grow a lot of my own food. chocolate milk in schools is absolutely insane and needs to be gone. the republicans stopped being my party a long time ago.
i had to write a letter to my kid's principle to stop them from giving my kid shitty candy all the time at school. wtf is up with people these days? how did people come to conflate "independence" and "freedom" with junk? kids should be getting water at school. how is this a controversial opinion?
Have we really gotten to a point where chocolate milk in schools can be called "absolutely insane"? Chocolate milk strikes a pretty good balance between tasting good and providing nutrition, probably more than most fruit juices
Why must it be one or the other? They should both be gone. There is no "balance." Chocolate milk and fruit juice are not healthy options, especially for children. Full stop. If it must be milk, plain 2% milk is sufficient to get the nutritional benefits.
And we haven't even considered if the milk in question has been sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup.