No, Banning Chocolate Milk in Schools Didn't Backfire

In 2011, in response to rising rates of childhood obesity, Oregon elected to remove chocolate milk from its school menus. The thinking was straightforward. Given that calories are the currency of weight, if the kids stopped consuming sugar-spiked chocolate milk they'd decrease the total number of calories, as well as the grams of added sugar, they consumed each day.

Well, just last week the data came in proving the experiment worked. According to the paper published in PLoS One, " Nutritional benefits to eliminating chocolate milk are an average decrease of 8 grams of sugar and 37 calories in a student's lunch."

So basically, even before accounting for kids throwing out 30 percent more white milk than they did chocolate milk, they were consuming two teaspoons less sugar a day (a third of their total daily recommend World Health Organization maximum) and had reduced their total daily consumed calories by somewhere on the order of 2 percent.

And it's not as if the kids were up in arms about their chocolaty losses either, as most switched over to the white stuff. According to the paper: "When chocolate milk was still an option, 77.8 percent of all students took milk. Once chocolate milk was removed, 71.4 percent took milk."

It all sounds fantastic to me.

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Yet the spin on this paper has been almost entirely negative, and it's not difficult to ascertain why. The press release from Cornell publicizing the study was entitled " Banning Chocolate Milk Backfires," and the paper itself from PLoS One suggests the clear reduction in added sugar (over a 180-day school year it'll add up to a reduction of 7.5 cups of added sugar per student) and calories (likely between 3 to 4 pounds a kid over the 180 days, once the 30 percent increased waste of white vs. chocolate milk is considered) "come at a cost." What cost, exactly?

"One gram of protein, a decrease of 5 percentage points in the daily recommended intake of calcium, and an additional 1/2 gram of fat per average student's lunch."

But given protein deficiency isn't an issue for American school children, and that the American RDIs for calcium are arguably far higher than are actually necessary and the drop small -- and that saturated fat is not the scary monster it was once made out to be -- this sure seems like a stretch in terms of negative spin.

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In their paper, the authors also suggest that the removal of chocolate milk may have had the additional unintended consequence of an 8.2 percent drop in the number of students purchasing a school lunch -- a worry echoed by Cornell's press release. Now even if true, this might not be a particularly bad outcome, given that the paper also reports that coincident with the removal of chocolate milk: "Parental and student demand, however, led to more frequent offerings of popular entrées such as pizza, tacos, burgers and breaded chicken products."

Frankly, it would seem to me to be a bonus were kids buying fewer of those meals as a result of chocolate milk's removal, though I think far more likely than chocolate milk's removal as a cause of the drop would be the 11 percent school lunch price increase that occurred at the same time.

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The only way for this data to be spun as a "backfire" would be if it were evaluated on the basis that milk is a beverage with such tremendous clinical health benefits that even the incredibly slight decrease in its consumption as seen here would lead to harm. But there is no such clinical worry. Remember, the paper actually reports that Oregon's chocolate milk removal barely dropped actual milk consumption, and only knocked down an RDI target for calcium by 5 percent. Yet America's RDI for calcium starts at a dramatically 40 percent higher value than the RDI recommendation for calcium in the United Kingdom.

Seems to me that the milk glass here is undeniably half full, in that removing chocolate milk from schools proved to be an easy and appropriate intervention that demonstrably lowered kids' consumption of added sugar and calories, without having a dramatic impact on their overall nutrition.

[Read: It's Up to Us, Not Our Kids, to Change the Food Environment .]

Yoni Freedhoff, MD, is an assistant professor of family medicine at the University of Ottawa, where he's the founder and medical director of the Bariatric Medical Institute -- dedicated to non-surgical weight management since 2004. Dr. Freedhoff sounds off daily on his award-winning blog, Weighty Matters, and you can follow him on Twitter @YoniFreedhoff. Dr. Freedhoff's latest book, "The Diet Fix: Why Diets Fail and How to Make Yours Work," is a national bestseller in Canada and is widely available across North America and online.