This is the intended result of dairy industry lobbying. Pizza is a vegetable and added sugar is healthy.
Delicious nutritious processed sugar! That’s right this highly refined white powder that can’t be found in nature is the healthiest thing you can eat! Buy it by the 5 pound bag and put it in everything. Put it in your morning coffee, your morning pancake, cover your morning bacon in it, and don’t forget to dip that apple you eat every day in caramel! Make sure your lunch is covered in ketchup, which is also loaded with sugar for your convenience. Go ahead and have that milk shake too!
can’t be found in nature
well there’s sugarcane, which google tells me is practically the same (so just as bad -.-)
Fun fact: most white sugar in the US comes from sugar beets. Easier to produce and process, I guess.
What’s so bad about corn syrup? It’s natural. Corn’s a fruit. Syrup comes from a bush.
It’s particularly high fructose corn syrup that’s real bad. I forget the specifics but the balance of fructose to sucrose is important to how our body processes it.
Oh, and the rest of the nutrients in fruit help slow the digestion of the sugars and mitigate some of the bad effects. But if you extract the sugar, it’s not so healthy for you anymore.
If sugars bad for you, how come Jesus made it taste so good?
And it makes the sunset really pink, because of the air pollution! But the the main question is, is it worth it?
Well it’s really hard to run tap lines from each corn cob especially when they just come and mow them down every year.
Yeah, thanks to all that marketing people even still think that milk is good for you (lol), even chocolate milk (rotflmao). Absurd. It’s too bad that market forces have so much influence over everything, including notions about what constitutes health.
Is this not a The Onion article? I… ugh.
Extinction level climate catastrophe on the horizon, better shill for the milk lobby!
Tom Tiffany needs to spend more time passing a budget and less time complaining about milk with added sugar.
Capitalism baby, you can buy for cheap legislative whores.
“Let them drink chocolate milk with their cake!”
Curious was the data say on the topic. I can see flavored milk being more appealing than unflavored, and encouraging kids to drink it.
Obviously added sugar isn’t great, but what is the net effect on health, in regards to the community as a whole?
What are the alternative drink choices? Fruit juice? Water? Just white milk?
The USDA wanted to ban flavored milks from elementary schools and limit the amount of said milks within high schools as part of a wave of new nutrition standards.
I think this is the only data the congressman and his milk industry lobbyists cared about:
According to the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, removing flavored milk from schools resulted in a 62% to 63% reduction in milk consumption by kids in kindergarten through fifth grade, as well as a 50% reduction in sixth to eighth grades.
Basically, ban flavored milks and children will drink less milk, which means less money for big milk, which is why this is a thing.
And if there’s less demand for milk, there’s less demand for corn, which is the real big business.
Which destroyed my hometown by forcing the corn farmers to produce for syrup/ethanol instead of food, leading to inflation across the board, driving farms to fail and the community to die off. Fuck the corn syrup industry and all the greedy capitalist bullshit like it. 🖕🏽
when i was in school, chocolate milk was only available one day a week (usually fridays). sensible meal planning by the schools to limit the extra sugar intake without ‘needing’ a law to do it. we didn’t have vending machines either, i was out of k12 before that trend took off.
and yea, i can see a ‘50% reduction’ in milk consumption–but only on those days. a lot of kids (including me) bought an extra carton or two (at 5 or 10 cents each back then) when chocolate milk was on the menu, because a little 8 ounce carton of chocolate milk is like a single swig.
Well, of course his motivation is Big Milk, that was never in dispute.
Milk does have excellent nutritional value. A reduction in milk consumption is also a reduction in some vitamin and protein intake. It could be that increasing milk consumption is good for his constituents, and milk consumption is good for the students health. Both things can be true at the same time.
I’d like to see what the data is on flavored milk specifically. Kids need to drink SOMETHING, and I’m curious if the alternative is better in the long run than chocolate milk.
Kids don’t need milk. After infancy you do not require dairy and during it your best option is human milk.
Any food without added sugar will be healthier than those with.
What’s a good alternate drink to offer kids (other than water)? You don’t NEED milk of course, but the goal is to provide nutrition and something they will actually eat/drink.
Why do you need to offer something besides water? Aside from which, there are plenty of alternatives. Herbal teas, seltzers, etc.
Were you never a kid, or…?
Those elementary kids sure do love unsweetened herbal teas
Milk itself is fine. The post I replied to made it sound like we need kids drinking milk and we don’t.
No, they asked the same question I did. What’s the answer?
Water then
If our schools were not captured by business interests, they ought to be doing things to actively discourage kids from drinking milk. Unfortunately, we still have so many adults that think milk is a health drink. But that’s the idea of the captives held in schools.
Why would milk be actively discouraged? Maybe for ethical reasons, but health wise what do you think is wrong with drinking milk?
A lot. Take a close look for yourself. No way we should be pushing that on kids - so they get a lifetime of chronic diseases that are brought about/made worse by things like milk. Unfortunately, there is a lot of active disinfo being carried out against adults and children in this country when it comes to nutrition. Drink milk for “health” and make sure to get as much “protein” (via unhealthy animal flesh) as possible, it will be good for you…
No, they would not discourage that as some kids need the calcium from milk because they do not eat green veggies enough.
Milk can be a healthy drink but it should not be your primary drink.
Milk and dairy in general are far too unhealthy for me to consider them something we should be pushing kids to drink. There are much better sources for things like calcium.
Source on better sources for calcium than dairy? Remember bioavailability of the calcium is going to be a more important factor than the amount of calcium present.
Curious was the data say on the topic.
?
Ninja edit: oh - “[I’m] curious what the data says on the topic.”. Right?
so weird. i’m a conservative christian. i grow a lot of my own food. chocolate milk in schools is absolutely insane and needs to be gone. the republicans stopped being my party a long time ago.
i had to write a letter to my kid’s principle to stop them from giving my kid shitty candy all the time at school. wtf is up with people these days? how did people come to conflate “independence” and “freedom” with junk? kids should be getting water at school. how is this a controversial opinion?
Have we really gotten to a point where chocolate milk in schools can be called “absolutely insane”? Chocolate milk strikes a pretty good balance between tasting good and providing nutrition, probably more than most fruit juices
Why must it be one or the other? They should both be gone. There is no “balance.” Chocolate milk and fruit juice are not healthy options, especially for children. Full stop. If it must be milk, plain 2% milk is sufficient to get the nutritional benefits.
And we haven’t even considered if the milk in question has been sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup.
not healthy options, especially for children. Full stop
I think you’re making this far more black and white than it needs to be. Fruit juice and sweetened milk can easily be part of a very healthy diet. Unless you’re a professional athlete, no one is watching their diet close enough for 8-12oz of juice to be an issue.
We’re not talking about adults, though, athletic or otherwise. We’re talking about children, and having a healthier diet in childhood gives better health outcomes as adults (e.g. forming good eating habits).
Having juice or sweetened milk on a regular basis trains your body to crave it and affects your gut health negatively. Additionally, and this is anecdotal, I can’t imagine it’s helping anyone’s behavior in school.
And as far as “diet watching” goes, take a look at European school lunches; generally far healthier and more well-rounded than what we find in the US, all because they give a fuck what their kids eat. Plus, I can assure you many parents are watching their kids’ diets as much as they can.
Schools shouldn’t be confounding the health efforts of parents. This is just shilling for the dairy industry disguised as lawmaking, plain and simple.
Seems like to make any kind of sense we’d have to accurately define “healthy”. Foods are healthy or unhealthy in context for the most part.
Is chocolate milk “unhealthy” compared to water? Depends what you’re looking for, it has added sugar but also provides solid macros and decent amounts of vitamins.
Sure, and I agree with your premise, but at that point, why not just drink plain milk? The added sugar is superfluous on top of the lactose (plus, we haven’t even covered the extra processing of the chocolate or artificial flavors that are all too common in American prepackaged foods).
But whatever the case, the politician making this “stand” isn’t doing it because he wants to ensure kids get the macros they need; he’s in the pocket of dairy lobbyists.
If they really want to do it right they’d get rid of dairy as much as possible. Dairy is not all that great for anyone.
We’re paying these fucking clowns how much for this shit? Unreal.
“FROM MY COLD, DEAD, HANDS!”
holds up half-pint of choccy milk
How did I know they’d have an “R” after their name without even looking?
