Milk is considered the ultimate food when it comes to child nutrition and those administering the food programs in schools and other nutrition intervention programs invariably are faced with increasing reluctance on the part of children to consume plain milk. Instead they are attracted to sweetened soft drinks and other beverages with practically no nutrition value. This phenomenon noticed during the transition from pre-school to school stages has been baffling social and nutrition scientists for quiet some time. It now turns out that this change in behavior could be due to indifferent quality of plain milk supplied at these schools by the distribution agency involved.
"Marlene Schwartz, deputy director of Yale University's Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, studied milk consumption in federally funded preschools across Connecticut that served only plain milk. She found that those young children drank it happily. "What I don't understand is, when a child turns five and enters kindergarten, all of a sudden people think they will stop drinking plain milk," she said. There may be reasons other than taste and sweetness that draw students to flavored milk. A young man from Altadena who attended public schools says, "The regular milk at schools is often spoiled. The chocolate milk is more popular, so it's fresher."
It is possible that dairy industry with its tight control over quality of milk used in the manufacture of flavored milk products is scoring over plain milk suppliers and longer life of processed/sterilized flavored milk makes it attractive to the administrators as well as the beneficiaries. It may be worth while to try out plain, standardized and stabilized milk, mildly sweetened unlike flavored processed milk and see whether school children will still prefer high sugar loaded milk beverages over plain milk.
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