Parents Throw Tantrum over Chocolate Formula

(CBS)  With childhood obesity rates soaring, a new chocolate-flavored toddler formula has sparked outrage from parents and nutritionists and has forced the manufacturer to pull it from the market.

The sugary beverage, marketed under the name Enfagrow Premium, was aimed at children as young as one year of age - especially picky or erratic eaters who need "nutritional support" after being weaned off breast milk or formula, the manufacturer, Mead Johnson, said in a prepared statement.

The company claims the beverage has "a superior nutritional profile to many other beverages typically consumed by toddlers, including apple juice, grape juice and similarly flavored dairy drinks."

But parents and nutritionists weren't swallowing that.

"This is a completely unnecessary product," Marion Nestle, professor of food studies and public health at New York University, told ABC News. "It's expensive and the first two ingredients are milk and the third is sugar. They could just add a teaspoon of sugar to the milk and get the same thing."

"You don't have to train kids to like candy," said Nestle. "What I hear is that mothers find it hard to get kids to eat. Of course they aren't hungry because they have been fed so much and kids get used to eating sweet things."

In light of the continuing obesity epidemic and rising rates of type 2 diabetes in children, the Institute of Medicine has called for tighter standards on nutrition claims.

Mead Johnson says Enfagrow Premium will remain on the market in three unflavored versions, along with a vanilla version that contains less sugar than the chocolate-flavored version.

But Nestle thinks she has already conceived the company's next big thing.

"Let's genetically modify moms to produce chocolate breast milk!" she wrote on her blog.

Let's hope no one is listening.