Pulling a Quik One: Food Giant Cuts Sugar in Flavored Milk

Now parents can feel just a little less guilty about giving their kids sweet flavored milk.

Giant food Nestle announced Monday that it's cutting the amount of added sugars in its flavored milk products. Its Nesquik powders—long marketed with that iconic Quik Bunny mascot—will now contain 10.6 grams of sugar for each two-tablespoon serving, which translates into a 15 percent reduction for the chocolate powders and a 27 percent reduction for the strawberry flavor, according to Reuters.

As for Nesquik’s bottled milk beverages, those will also contain 10.6 grams of added sugar per serving (though because of the lactose naturally present in the milk, the total sugar content is higher). The reformulated products will start appearing in stores this month.

The move appears to be part of a broader push by Nestle to reduce the amount of sugar, salt, and artificial ingredients in products aimed at kids, which includes cutting the amount of sugar per serving in children’s breakfast cereal to 9 grams or less.

But as big food makers have slowly started to take responsibility for the role their products—often sugary, salty, and loaded with fat—have played in the obesity crisis and associated public health ills, the storyline is becoming more familiar: Some food company announces an incremental change to a particular line of products, only to be greeted with a tepid response from public health advocates.

“It’s a nice step in the right direction, but it’s not a huge victory for nutrition,” Michael Jacobson, executive director for the Center for Science in the Public Interest, said of the Nestle announcement in an interview with Reuters.

Such qualified praise no doubt leaves companies such as Nestle fuming behind the scenes. After all, established brands like Nesquik are worth hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue per year, and reformulating them can lead to commercial disaster, something that Nestle hints at on its own website.

“We know it can be a challenge getting kids to eat a balanced breakfast—or any breakfast at all—so we are taking a gradual approach to reducing sugar, to help adapt taste preferences for the long term. Sometimes, reducing sugar without affecting flavour, texture, structure, colour and preservative properties is a significant challenge.”

Of course, the underlying message there seems to be the problem is kids: Those darn rugrats just won’t eat breakfast unless it’s chock full of as much sugar as a king sized candy bar.

What Nestle’s statement doesn’t account for is the role Big Food has played in acclimating the public palate to a “norm” in which highly processed foods are designed to send our pleasure receptors into overdrive. It’s hard to imagine, but as two prominent researchers wrote last year in The New York Times, “If you consider that the added sugar in a single can of soda might be more than most people would have consumed in an entire year, just a few hundred years ago, you get a sense of how dramatically our environment has changed.”

Thus, as science continues to reveal the negative impacts on our health from too much added sugar, public health agencies have been busy revising their nutritional guidelines—which likely leaves the big food giants feeling like the goal posts are constantly being moved further away.

Just last month, the World Health Organization finalized its recommendation that added sugars contribute no more than 10 percent of daily calorie intake, and even went so far to issue a provisional recommendation that the limit should probably be more like 5 percent.

For kids, that means capping the amount of added sugar to approximately 15 grams per day, which does leave room for a bottle of Nestle’s newly reformulated Nesquik—but not much else.

Related stories on TakePart:

• No, Really: You’re Probably Eating Way Too Much Sugar

• Kids’ ‘Fruit’ Drinks May Have More Sugar Than Soda—and Parents Don’t Realize It

• Burger King Finally Kicks Soda off Its Kids’ Menu

Original article from TakePart