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Biden admin considers banning chocolate milk from elementary schools

by

Daily Caller News Foundation

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is considering prohibiting elementary schools from offering chocolate milk to students in an effort to reduce kids’ sugar intake, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The USDA is weighing a ban on flavored milk, including chocolate and strawberry, from elementary and middle school meals, a decision that could be finalized by the 2025-2026 school year, according to the WSJ. Whether the department decides to restrict the milk from elementary schools, the flavored drinks would have to meet new restrictions on the amount of added sugar allowed.

“Flavored milk is a challenging issue to figure out exactly the best path forward,” Cindy Long, administrator of USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service, told the outlet. “We really do want to encourage children to consume milk and we also recognize the need to reduce added-sugar consumption.”

The USDA mandates that school districts serve a minimum of two types of milks, one of which must be skim, plain or 1%. School districts are not allowed to serve whole or 2% milk but can offer flavored milk if it is fat free or 1%.

Flavored milk was one of the main sources of sugar in students’ school meals, increasing the push to remove the beverage from the nation’s school districts, the WSJ reported.

“From a public-health perspective, it makes a lot of sense to try to limit the servings of these flavored milks because they do have quite a lot of added sugar,” Erica Lauren Kenney, a public-health and nutrition professor at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, told the outlet.

Thirty-seven distributors who supply 90% of the milk in schools pledged in April to limit their beverages to 10 grams of added sugars per 8 ounces to align with new USDA standards, according to the WSJ. The milk distributors sell nearly $2 billion of the beverage to school districts each year.

Those opposed to the potential ban worry that restricting flavored milk could cause students to limit their dairy intake, the WSJ reported.

“Do we want kids to get the calcium, the protein, the additional nutrients that are part of milk?” Jessica Gould, the director of nutrition services for Littleton Public Schools in Colorado, told the outlet. “Because when we were only providing white milk, we did see a significant amount of students didn’t take milk in general.”

The USDA did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

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Republished with permission from Daily Caller News Foundation

1 Comment

  1. How about starting with the kinds of food that can be purchased with SNAP/EBT cards? No snacks, ( chips, etc) no candy, no carbonated drinks. Only fresh veggies and fruits and low grade cuts of meat and poultry. I routinely see carts loaded with massive amounts of high calorie, non-nutritional foods and at checkout the bill is paid with EBT/SNAP. Upfront we are allowing people to exist in a taxpayer funded nutritional desert and then picking up the medical tab for them when their health goes south. Where is the logic in this?

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