On his sixth day on the job, Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, in the name of regulatory flexibility and making school meals more attractive to students, gave schools the green light to serve chocolate milk again. A new study suggests, however, that over time, schoolchildren do not miss flavored milk all that much.
Researchers at the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity say most children adjust to drinking plain milk following removal of flavored milk. Since 2012, most schools have offered fat-free and low-fat plain milk to better align their meals with the Dietary Guidelines. The result, according to Cornell researchers, was more waste and less milk consumption, and lower protein and calcium intake by students. The cartons of flavored milk served as part of school lunches contain up to 10 grams of added sugar, which is 40 percent of the recommended daily amount for children, says the Rudd Center.
Marlene Schwartz, the lead author of the study, said removal of flavored milk “has both nutritional benefits and potential costs. It is clearly an effective way to lower student intake of added sugars at lunch, and over time, the majority of students will switch to plain milk.” The remaining challenge is meeting the dietary needs of children who don’t like plain milk, said Schwartz, who is director of the Rudd Center.
For the study, published in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, Rudd researchers followed milk consumption at two elementary schools in a small, urban New England district in 2010-2011, immediately after flavored milk was withdrawn from menus and in 2012-13, two years later. In the first year without flavored milk, 51.5 percent of students selected a carton of plain milk. Two years later, 72 percent of students selected milk. In both of the years studied, milk demand dropped significantly if 100 percent fruit juice was offered.
Flavored milk was a fixture in school meals for years. USDA data indicate that 47 percent of elementary school children and 30 percent of middle school students consumed flavored milk at school on an average day in 2005, said the Rudd study, Further, said the researchers, the majority of flavored milk consumed by children was at school.