We just got off the phone with Tom Vilsack!

The Fooducate blog was honored to be invited to a first ever blogger conference call with U.S. Department of Agriculture secretary Tom Vilsack earlier today. The call was in celebration of the USDA joining as a partner in the  “Fuel Up to Play 60” partnership between the National Dairy Council and the NFL.

The idea of the program is to educate and empower kids to make healthier food choices as well as exercise 60 minutes a day. Over 60,000 schools have signed up to the program so far.

This is a win-win for everyone involved. The star power of the NFL athletes is a huge magnet for kids who move their bodies more. And obviously the dairy council is happy because low-fat milk is getting pushed to the schools instead of other, less nutritious beverages.

And while we commend this shift from soda pop to milk, we take point at the “flavored milk” options that are sneaking in tons of sugar to kids through the back door. The most popular flavored milk is, of course, chocolate milk. It’s also a drink that Mr. Vilsack admitted that he loves, deferring a question about the sweetness by blogger Eddie Gehman Kohan of ObamaFoodorama.

Unfortunately, an 8 oz. single serve bottle of chocolate milk has THREE TEASPOONS of added sugar. While consuming this once a day will not have a huge caloric impact (3 teaspoons = 12 grams = 48 added calories), the uber-sweetness has an unwanted side effect – suddenly apples, pears, bananas, and even the chocolate milk prepared at home (milk+cocoa powder) don’t see so tasty anymore. They’re not sweet enough.

In the Q&A part of the call, I asked Secretary Vilsack why not work with the Dairy Council to move the manufacturers to lower sugar levels. The response from Jean Ragalie, the Executive Vice President of Health and Wellness at NDC, was :

1. the sugar in chocolate milk is only 2% of added sugars consumed by kids, so it is insignificant. (Update – here is the exact data: Flavored milk accounts for less than 3.5 percent of added sugar intake in children ages 6-12 and less than 2 percent in teens. To put this in context, soft drinks, fruit drinks and tea provide a combined 31.5 percent of total added sugar intake for children ages 6-12 and 40 percent for teens according to NPD Nutrient Intake Database (2 years ending Feb, 2009))
2. studies show that children drinking chocolate milk are not gaining any more weight than others, but are getting more milk in their bodies, which is important due to milk’s inherent nutrition.
3. Lastly and most disturbing, Secretary Vilsack summed in a nutshell: Kids won’t drink chocolate milk unless it’s this sweet.

It’s a vicious cycle. The kids get hooked on super sweet tastes starting with their morning cereal, then their candy bars during recess, followed by chocolate milk that must be as sweet. And more sweet as the day winds down at home.

No wonder the fruit served at lunch alongside the chocolate milk tastes so bland.

We suggested in the past, and still do – NDC, USDA – please work together to “convince” manufacturers to reduce the sugar in their flavored milks. Build a voluntary incentive plan to have manufacturers remove half a teaspoon of sugar  every school year for the next 3 years, and we promise to shut up about this matter.

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The National Dairy Council is launching a new campaign today -  Raise your Hands for Chocolate Milk. The gist of it:

• Schools MUST keep chocolate milk available for children to choose at lunchtime.
• Milk is a much better choice nutritionally than sodas or juice.
• Chocolate milk  has only 60 more calories than plain milk.
• Kids love it and will therefore drink more milk.

While this sounds great, there’s a problem not addressed: Children are consuming much too many calories from sugar. The additional sugar in flavored milk can add up to an extra 5 pounds of body weight over the course of a school year, says chef Ann Cooper, Renegade Lunch Lady of Boulder, Colorado.

So is this new campaign justified?

What you need to know:

Few people would argue that drinking milk instead of soda pop is a bad choice. And anyone who has children knows that their attraction to sweet is like a magnetic force. So if adding some sugar and flavor is the vehicle to get children drinking milk, it makes sense that we all raise our hands for chocolate milk.

The question then becomes, how much added sugar?

Would you add over 3 teaspoons of sugar to your child’s 8 oz cup of milk?

Probably not. But that’s exactly the amount being added to kids’ chocolate milk.

We asked Karen Kafer, RD, VP Health Partnerships at National Dairy Council, about all that added sugar. She responded that in market testing conducted by the milk manufacturers, the 3 added teaspoons seemed to be the magic number that got kids to drink the most milk. She did not disagree that less sugar would be better, but added that right now that’s what manufacturers are selling because that’s what kids like.

The problem for many parents is that once kids get used to sweet, it’s hard to get them back to “un-sweet”. At home they may be used to drinking plain milk, or very lightly sweetened milk at breakfast (flattened teaspoon of Nesquik anyone?). But once they start school and get a daily fix of super sweet chocolate milk, they’ll demand the same at home.

So here’s a challenge to the National Dairy Council – work with the processors of flavored milks to schools and get them ALL to agree to a gradual reduction in the sugar content of their products. Maybe not overnight, but in the course of a year or two, they can easily cut those 3 teaspoons of sugar down to one. Everyone wins -

1. Children will be getting an even healthier product without even noticing a taste sacrifice,
2. Manufacturers won’t lose market share because all of them will be taking this step at the same time, and
3. The National Dairy Council will earn extra credit promoting a holistic nutrition approach, not just milk.

And one more request to the manufacturers – although chocolate milk has no artificial colorings, the strawberry milk does. Red 40 has been associated with hyperactivity in children and is being phased out in the UK. Please, please remove it from your products and use natural colors instead.

What to do at the supermarket:

As a matter of practicality, buying prepared chocolate milk is very convenient. However the Yoo-hoos of the world are extremely sweetened. One option is to mix it with regular milk to lower the sugar content. Another is to buy the powders or syrups and control how much you add to each glass of milk.

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• Chocolate milk controversy (timesunion.com)

flickr photo: Laurel Fan

Who hasn’t been told to cut down on fatty food, cholesterol, salt, sugar, and “practically everything that tastes good”. After a while, people just ignore these warnings because it seems that there is nothing healthy left to eat. After several decades of “negative” nutritional messages, messages encouraging people to eat foods with positive nutrients are becoming more prevalent. Products are not just touting low fat content, they are also boasting high levels of fiber, omega-3, and other goodies.

One group that has been an active player in the “Yes to good food” camp rather than the “No to bad food” approach is the Nutrient Rich Foods Coalition. The NRFC is a not-for-profit organization that represents for-profit commodity growers in the US, including the National Dairy Council, the California Avocado Commission, the Wheat Council, and others. All 5 major food groups are in.

We recently spoke with Dr Greg Miller, a spokesperson for the NRFC. Dr Miller is an executive vice president of the National Dairy Council. In our conversation we discussed the coalition’s approach to nutrition information, as well as dairy specific issues (we’ll write about those in a separate post).

The Nutrient Rich Foods Coalition formed about 5 years ago with the goal of creating a paradigm shift in nutrition education. The idea is to move away from 30 years of negatives, to a more encouraging focus on foods with maximum good nutrients per calorie. Some foods pack lots of health into a low number of calories. Others, called junk foods, fill people up with empty calories. The coalition funded several academic studies to explore various ways of defining which foods are nutrient dense and which are not.

An algorithm that was developed by Professor Adam Drewnowski, Director, Nutritional Sciences Program, at the University of Washington, exemplifies this approach. Called NRF9.3, this algorithm uses a food product’s levels of 9 nutrients to encourage and 3 nutrients to limit, and then calculates a nutrition score. The nutrients are those appearing on a packaged food’s nutrition label. They are protein, fiber, vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin E, calcium, iron, potassium, magnesium, fats, sodium, and sugars.

Various products can be compared based on their nutrition score. According to Dr. Miller, the algorithm has been validated against the Healthy Eating Index and found to have statistically significant correlations between high scoring foods and better health.

The NRFC is taking an approach similar to that of NuVal / ONQI which we covered a few weeks ago. However, NRFC does not have a retail roll-out planned at this time. The organization is currently focused  on educational and informational activities.

Cynics will say that any organization representing the food industry will prefer messages that encourage eating more (even if more of good foods) rather than messages of “eating less”, this despite the fact that most Americans need to reduce their daily caloric intake. What is clear to the NRFC, as well as anybody dealing with nutrition today, is that consumers are confused about what to eat and what not to eat. They will welcome a solution that makes it easier to choose better foods. And if a system that encourages eating real foods works for people, great.

Some suggestions from the NRFC include:

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