An article in this morning’s Ottawa Citizen newspaper says the eternal war over whether Chocolate Milk is healthy or not may be decided in the upcoming revision of Canada’s Food Guide. It’s the first update of the classic recommendations for Canadian diners since 2007…
The current (soon to be supplanted) edition of Canada’s Food Guide. This 2007
version still lists Chocolate Milk and Fruit Juices as good sources
of essential nutrients, but ignores the Sugar and Calories…
The new Guide will appear this fall first as an online, interactive digital tool, which is intended to be used by consumers to help them make better eating choices.
Hasan Hutchinson, Director General of the Office of Nutrition Policy and Promotion at Health Canada, told the Citizen, the new Guide will offer tools and resources people can use when dining in, shopping or enjoying a restaurant meal. It will also offer planning and diagnostic tools for dietary and medical professionals, something not offered before. And the new Guide will be what Hutchinson calls a living document, being updated regularly as new research findings emerge.
In a major departure for previous editions, the new Canada’s Food Guide will not deal in portion sizes. Instead, Hutchinson says, it will talk in terms of portions, concentrating more on the ratios of different foods on your plate. “If we could get people to make half their plates fruit and vegetables, I think a lot of the problems would go away.”
About Chocolate milk…
Chocolate Milk and Fruit Juices will probably receive at least a cautionary note in the new Food Guide, if not an outright ‘thumbs down’. Both contain relatively large amounts of Sugar and have lately come under fire as contributors to Childhood Obesity. A recent provincial election in New Brunswick saw debate on whether Chocolate Milk should be banned in schools come to the fore as a platform plank, with the Liberals for and the Conservatives against. Just for the record, the Conservatives won the vote 22 seats to 21 – leaving the debate a toss-up, by that admittedly crude measure.
Ottawa obesity expert Yoni Freedhoff says he expects the new Food Guide to at least recommend that Chocolate Milk and Fruit Juices be considered treats and be limited in the diets of children.
Freedhoff remarked that, if a child consumed a single 250 ml / 8 oz carton of Chocolate Milk every day over the average 180-day school year, the kid would be consuming something like 10 pounds / 4.5 kg of Sugar. He also noted that Chocolate Milk contains twice the Calories of other Sugar-sweetened beverages such as Coke Classic and Gatorade.
“If the Food Guide had said, ‘This is something that should be limited in children, that should be considered a treat’, this would be a non-issue,” Freedhoff told the Citizen. “I would be flabbergasted if the new Food Guide did not state that sugar sweetened milks are beverages that should be explicitly limited in children. Should it say that, it would follow that school chocolate milk programs would be on school boards’ chopping blocks — though I’d also bet it will take a fair bit of time until it is universally removed.”
My take…
I agree that it will be tough to squeeze Chocolate Milk out of family and school diets.
As long as kids howl for Chocolate Milk, parents will allow it as a regular thing. Just to shut the little guys up. If the school systems ban it, they’ll be in for criticism from health and nutrition officials who’ll say that kids aren’t getting enough Milk nutrients. Because it’s been proven over and over again that plain White Milk is the last beverage kids choose at the school lunch counter.
I think the only way to get kids off their Chocolate Milk fixation (addiction?) is to find something they like even more that’s more nutritious and less fattening. I have no idea what that might be. Whoever does come up with the answer to that question should get a Nobel Prize.
~ Maggie J.