Andy Tullis / The Bulletin file photoStudents eat lunch at Culver Elementary School in 2014. A dip in enrollment is partly to blame for a Culver School District budget shortfall.

The question of whether chocolate milk should be served in K-12 cafeterias isn’t one that tends to draw objective responses.

On the contrary, it’s a highly politicized issue known to drum up emotional reactions from parents and comprehensive marketing campaigns from the dairy industry.

Jamie Smith, district nurse for the Jefferson County School District, decided to take a look for himself. Aided by a small grant from Oregon Health & Science University, he studied what would happen when he removed chocolate milk from school lunches in Madras Primary, a kindergarten through second-grade school, for a three-week period between April and May 2012.

It should be noted that Smith himself is not an unbiased source on the subject. For years he’d sided with the large camp of people that argue if kids don’t get chocolate milk, they won’t drink milk at all and will miss out on the crucial nutrients it contains: calcium and vitamins A and D. But after not being able to find hard evidence to support the claim, he switched sides.

Now, Smith said, he thinks children in schools are just too young to make an educated choice, especially with the barrage of marketing directed at them.

“My stance is that as a school, we should try to use the food service setting as an educational opportunity as well,” he said.

In any case, the study, Smith said, was done objectively, and even followed training from OHSU on performing research within communities.

Smith and his team found that after chocolate milk was removed from school lunches the percentage of children who chose plain milk jumped to about 42 percent from 6 percent.

Overall milk consumption, however, dropped from about 69 percent of students who selected milk — an average of 63 percent of which was chocolate — to 42 percent. That data could be skewed, however, by the large proportion of students who chose bottled water, an average of about 49 percent of students after chocolate milk was removed. Bottled water is usually not served during school lunches, but became necessary to offer as an alternative for students who did not choose plain milk.

Critics of chocolate milk in schools are chiefly concerned about the amount of added sugar in chocolate milk versus plain milk, which contains natural sugar. In Smith’s study, he found that prior to chocolate milk removal, Madras Primary students averaged about 7.9 grams of added sugar per lunch. Afterward, that went down to about 0.7 grams of added sugar, he said.

Smith has calculated the amount of added sugar kids get from flavored milk each day could add almost 2 pounds per child per school year, or almost 25 pounds over 13 years of schooling.

The researchers also measured the amount of liquid the students actually drank within the selections they made in the lunch line, including water and milk. Prior to the removal of chocolate milk, students drank an average of 0.57 cups of their beverage of choice. Afterward, they drank 0.63 cups.

Although the study was small — it only included about 300 kids — Smith feels it holds weight as an argument against serving chocolate milk in schools.

“The argument for years has been if you take flavored milk away, they’re not going to drink milk,” he said. “What our study showed is that the white milk choice did increase as well, and that was definitely contradictory to what the argument had been for years.”

Conflicting opinions

Smith and his team took their results before the Jefferson County School Board in late August 2013. The members debated a proposal to limit chocolate milk to Fridays only, but ultimately rejected the proposal.

The Bend-La Pine School Board agreed to hear arguments on the issue back in May 2012 after receiving a petition with more than 500 signatures urging it to ban flavored milk in schools. The board did not vote on the issue, and chocolate milk is still served in schools.

Since the U.S. Department of Agriculture mandated that flavored milk served in schools be fat-free, chocolate milk has become the only flavored milk served in local schools. That’s because local supplier Eberhard’s Dairy Products in Redmond wasn’t able to formulate fat-free strawberry or root beer-flavored milk — flavors that used to be served on occasion in Bend-La Pine Schools.

Bob Eberhard, the owner of Eberhard’s and the school’s milk supplier since 1969, spoke against the proposal at the Jefferson County School Board meeting, even passing out samples of his company’s chocolate milk for the board members to try.

“The only difference between regular milk and chocolate milk is the fact that we put some cocoa powder in it and some sugar in it,” Eberhard said in an interview. “But all the nutrients are still there. That outweighs the little bit of sugar — and the cocoa powder is not even an issue.”

Eberhard said he didn’t make the Bend-La Pine meeting, but he did work with Terry Cashman, the district’s director of nutrition services and operations, and “made sure he had the information he needed.”

Plain, 1 percent milk has 12 grams of natural sugar, Eberhard said. When the company makes chocolate milk, it adds 10 grams of sugar, bringing the total sugar content per serving to 22 grams.

Eberhard’s has reduced the number of calories in its chocolate milk from 190 calories per serving in 1967 to 130 calories as of 2011, and it’s fat-free, as per USDA regulations, Eberhard said.

The Culver School District, a three-school district within Jefferson County, is in its third school year of restricting chocolate milk to Fridays only, said Diana Cretsinger, the district’s nutrition services supervisor.

Cretsinger said she got the idea to cut down on chocolate milk while watching the British chef and media personality Jamie Oliver on TV. Oliver remarked that anybody will eat something that’s covered in sugar.

“It just kind of got me to thinking, ‘Yeah, that’s true,’” she said. “We’ll all eat something with extra sugar in it, because it tastes good.”

Since making the change, Cretsinger acknowledges the district has seen a slight increase in the amount of white milk being thrown away, although she said the students are taking just as much milk as they go through the lunch line. She could not provide numbers on the amount of milk being taken or thrown away.

Students are not required to take milk, as long as they have other components on their trays that meet federal guidelines, Cretsinger said.

“They don’t have to take the milk, but, all in all, they do,” she said.

Schools are required to abide by a strict set of nutrition guidelines under the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 that include specific levels of fruits, vegetables, whole-grain foods, milk, fat, calories and sodium. Removing the chocolate milk eliminated sugar content that was making it difficult to meet the guidelines, Cretsinger said.

Eberhard, on the other hand, said he thinks schools would need to change their menus to have enough nutrients to meet the guidelines if they took away the chocolate milk.

The power of big dairy

It’s difficult — if not impossible — to find studies on the health effects of flavored milk compared with plain milk that are not sponsored by the dairy industry or the USDA, one of the responsibilities of which is to keep dairy farmers in business.

A 2012 study in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, for example, found that when flavored milk was removed from a school district, overall milk sales dropped by 11 percent, or a daily average of 15 fewer students consuming milk. The study’s authors, each of whom work in Cornell University’s Center for Behavioral Economics in Child Nutrition Programs, concluded that while eliminating flavored milk reduces sugar intake, it also takes away a good source of nutrients, like calcium and vitamins A and D.

A closer look at the study, however, reveals it was funded in part by the USDA. In fact, nearly half of the published and ongoing research performed by the Center for Behavioral Economics in Child Nutrition Programs was sponsored by the USDA.

Another study published in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association in 2008 found that consuming either flavored or plain milk had a positive impact on nutrient intake and neither were associated with adverse effects on body mass index measures.

That study was funded by the private consulting firm ENVIRON International Corp., whose principal consultant lists dairy as an area of expertise on the company’s website.

Brian Wansink, a Cornell University professor and co-director of the Cornell Center for Behavioral Economics in Child Nutrition Programs, co-wrote the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior article. He said the stringent peer-review process articles go through before being published in academic journals is a “powerful equalizer” that ensures they are based on high-level research as opposed to questionable press releases put out by a dairy council.

Asked about the multitude of marketing content that’s circulated by the dairy industry, Wansink said he doesn’t pay much attention to that. In fact, he said, he doesn’t read other articles beyond his own research.

In the end, taking away small indulgences like chocolate milk doesn’t actually lead to healthier food choices, Wansink said. In fact, it can actually prompt people to act out by doing the opposite, he said.

“You take chocolate milk away, people say, ‘Wait a minute, I don’t have chocolate milk, I can’t get a cookie — why would I eat school lunch?’” He said. “‘I’m going to bring potato chips and a 2-liter bottle of Dr. Bob’s pop.’”

Smith countered that if schools offer chocolate milk, parents and students will automatically think it’s OK because it’s served in an educational setting.

Rather, he said, it should be offered once a week as a “treat.”

“As opposed to offering it daily as something that then potentially trains the young kid’s palette to crave a sweet with every meal for the rest of their life.”

— Reporter: 541-383-0304,

tbannow@bendbulletin.com