Los Angeles milk ban aims to curb child obesity: Have health police run amok?
Los Angeles schools banned chocolate and strawberry milk after celebrity chef Jamie Oliver mounted campaign
/ Getty Images(CBS/AP) With childhood obesity a growing problem in the U.S., schools across the country are seeing what they can do to help kids keep the weight off. To do its part, the Los Angeles Unified School District - with about 688,000 students, the nation's second-largest - has implemented a controversial ban of chocolate and strawberry milk.
It joins a growing number of school districts nationwide, including Washington D.C., Boulder Valley, Colo., and Berkeley, Calif., that serve only plain milk at its schools.
The proposal by L.A. Superintendent John Deasy came on the heels of months of criticism by British TV chef and obesity advocate, Jamie Oliver, who said flavored milks contain the sugar equivalent of a candy bar.
In a stunt on his ABC show "Food Revolution," he filled a school bus with sand to represent the amount of added sugar students in Los Angeles drink in a year through flavored milk.
Some lauded the ban.
"Thirty percent of our kids are obese or are on track to diabetes," said Jennie Cook of Food for Lunch, a coalition advocating nutritious school food who has been pushing the district to eliminate flavored milk for the past year. "This is a social justice issue."
Emily Ventura, a researcher with the University of Southern California's Childhood Research Center, said 6,000 parents from the district had signed a petition to eliminate flavored milk from the district.
But board member Tamar Galatzan, the vote's lone dissenter, said health advocates including the American Heart Association say the nutritional benefits of flavored milk outweigh the harm of added sugar - because kids drink less milk if they aren't offered flavored options.
She also points to the hypocrisy of the district serving fruit juices containing 27 to 29 grams of sugar per serving, more than the amount of sugar in flavored milk - 20 grams in 8 ounces of fat-free chocolate milk and 27 grams in fat-free strawberry.
Galatzan is mostly miffed by the perception that the district was caving in to Oliver, who unsuccessfully lobbied the district to be allowed to film in its schools.
"I really don't understand why we're letting a TV chef dictate our policy."
What do you think? Is the chocolate milk ban a good idea? Or just evidence of a growing "nanny state?"
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What ever happened to the days of 'You'll eat what's put in front of you and if you don't like it, then starve'?
Need to go back to that.
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First, I'll bet you heard that like I did, from your parents. Back in the '50's. Second, if you did that these days & actually followed through it wouldn't be long before somebody dropped a dime on you & then you'd be defending your custody of your children from the DFS for "starving" them. Third, the petition to ban chocolate & strawberry milk was signed by 6,000 parents. With an enrollment of about 688,000 students we can figure at least 1,000,000 parents (they usually, but not always, come in pairs) so 6,000 represents 6/10's of 1 per cent. What this is really about is not some English chef or the petition, or even better nutrition for the students. It's about the school district protecting itself from a class-action lawsuit.
No matter what your personal opinion is as far as Jamie Oliver is concerned, he IS fighting the good fight, and that is BIG BUSINESS dictating what your children are getting at school. Not big government. Your politicians are run by their lobbyists, and this is an all too well known fact, so I don't have to get into details, I'm sure. ;)
There is no place on earth were kids are being diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes, as much as in the US, and whether or nor fruit juices are rich in sugar, at least they contain some amount of vitamins and NATURAL sugar(hopefully), and not the processed one added to just about anything your kids are eating. Not to mention corn syrup etc...!
It's a matter of getting back to basics, and eating good, wholesome food that's actually good for you! Will you be able to eradicate obesity? Certainly not, as you can gain weight by good food as well, but serving kids processed crap every day, is setting them up for all sorts of problems, not only when they'll grow up, but much sooner still.
Government is there to govern. To make sure certain standards are met, looking out for a country's citizens(hopefully). It doesn't mean socialism, or anything in that direction. It's purely what it's for. That's its sole(true) purpose. Or at least, it should be.
While I agree with the chocolate milk ban, it doesn't tackle the root of the problem that most food produced in the U.S. is processed low quality junk. Typical industrial milk is pasteurized, homogenized, and comes from cows confined in a feedlot and fed cheap grain. So while plain milk is a healthier product than chocolate milk with refined sugars, it still isn't necessarily healthy. 200 years ago all the milk in existence was raw, unhomogenized, and came from grass-fed cows, and 200 years ago we didn't suffer from the diseases we see today.
I also notice that people put too much emphasis on calorie and fat counts. There are many high-calorie, high-fat foods that are incredibly healthy, such as raw milk and virgin coconut oil. What's really important to eating healthy is reading the ingredient lists of the foods and eating mostly unprocessed whole foods. Just because a food is low in fat and calories doesn't mean it's healthy as it likely contains processed ingredients directly responsible for a slew of diet-related diseases.
Seriously? I mean seriously????
We were given chocolate milk very occasionally, as a special treat, when I was a child. My parents would have been furious if schools had been passing out chocolate milk to us. And I'd have been equally furious if schools had handed out chocolate milk to my kids every day.
We did not, as children, decide what we would eat and what we wouldn't. My mother fixed dinner and you either ate what she fixed or went hungry. Same with my kids.
So I'm not buying some absurd argument that children won't get enough calcium in their diets unless their milk is loaded with sugar, too.
If parents want to load their kids up on sugar when they're at home, that's their business. School meals should be as healthy as possible, given the budget. Kids don't need a big Snickers bar with every school lunch, and that means they also don't need chocolate milk every day.
ccdsswrkr08, too far? Not is this article; chocolate milk has more calories and sugar than a can of soda. Give some examples of "too far."
I was commenting that the government has gone from trying to make everyone a football/baseball star, to trying to make everyone into computer geniuses, with no thought to actual physical exercise in daily routine. How old are you? Can you tell me when you were in elementary school, how many recesses you had a day, and times a week you had gym class? Cause today, they're lucky if they get 1 recess and gym maybe once a week.
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I would think this has more to do with cultural indoctrination and access, and less to do with the actual children's inclinations which are inferred to be intractable by her statement.