(Host) A University of Vermont researcher has some advice for parents and school administrators: Encourage kids to drink milk, even if it requires a spoonful of sugar to make it go down.
As VPR’s Ross Sneyd reports, a new study has concluded that the small amount of sugar in flavored milk doesn’t contribute to childhood obesity.
(Sound of cafeteria)
(Sneyd) At H.O. Wheeler Elementary School in Burlington, Joyce Irvine is principal. During lunch, she directs traffic, cajoles kids to take a few more bites, and helps clear trays.
(Sound of Irvine clearing trays, talking to children) "Thank you. Where’s Tyler?”
(Sneyd) She fits this into her already-busy schedule because she knows the nutrition her students are getting at lunchtime is so important.
(Irvine) "For some of these kids it’s the best meal they’ll get. Just financially it’s hard for parents to afford fresh vegetables and fruit.”
(Sound of cafeteria workers offering spaghetti, buns and cookies)
(Sneyd) Today’s menu includes spaghetti or a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a roll, a cookie, and a pass through the salad bar.
But the first thing that lands on trays is a pint of milk and the kids get their choice of white or chocolate.
UVM nutritionist Rachel Johnson loves to see the kids drinking milk. Too often, she says, they’re skipping milk altogether.
(Johnson) "One of the reasons we did this research is I was becoming very concerned there are schools across the country that, in their effort to do something about childhood obesity, have been removing flavored milks as a choice to children.”
(Sneyd) Why? Because there’s sugar in that chocolate milk. And sugar is contributing to an increase in the "body mass index” – in other words, fat.
So, in a research project funded by the National Dairy Council, Johnson and a fellow researcher asked whether the children who drank flavored milk had more body fat than kids who drank no milk.
(Johnson) "And what our research showed was that limiting children and teens’ access to flavored milk due to its slightly higher sugar or slightly higher calorie content, may only have the undesirable effect of reducing their intakes of essential important nutrients while at the same time having no impact whatsoever on their body weight.”
(Sneyd) Here are some of the highlights of the study of 75-hundred children, published last week in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association.
Those drinking flavored milk weren’t getting any more sugar than kids who drank no milk. Their body fat was comparable to – or lower – than the non-milk drinkers. And kids with flavored milk in their diets drank a lot more milk – along with its concentration of vitamins and minerals.
The paper confirms what’s seen in Burlington schools every day. Doug Davis oversees food service for the 3,800 students in the district.
He says Burlington schools hand out a million pints of milk a year – and 70 percent of it is chocolate.
(Davis) "I think that kids choose their foods by flavor a lot of the time.”
(Sneyd) Davis limits the milk to half-percent fat. And he’s working with a distributor to find flavored milk that has something other than high fructose corn syrup as a sweetener.
He’s done a survey of how much milk gets thrown out after lunch. He’s found that kids finish off cartons of chocolate more often than they drain cartons of white milk.
(Davis) "I think at the end of the day they go home with more nutrients in their belly than they would had they only gotten the white milk choice.”
(Sneyd) None of that does any good, though, if the entire meal isn’t balanced. So Burlington schools have salad bars, they serve whole grain breads. And they buy as much fresh, local produce as they can.
For VPR News, I’m Ross Sneyd.