San Francisco school children who learned to live without soda and candy will soon have to give up chocolate milk too.
The city’s school district is to ban chocolate milk in elementary and middle schools this fall, and in high schools in the spring, the San Francisco Chronicle reported on Monday.
The school district already bans sodas in schools and does not allow cookies or other sweets to be served with lunch.
One carton of chocolate milk includes about 40 percent of the recommended daily allowance of sugar in a child’s diet, supporters said.
Officials in San Francisco tested the ban in five schools in the past school year and found that in two, there was no decrease in the number of milk cartons kids consumed. There was only a slight dip in the other three schools.
“The kids grumbled about it for a couple of days,” said Libby Albert, executive director of the district’s Student Nutrition Services. “But for the most part, they just switched to white milk.”
Most elementary and middle-school students attending the summer session at George Washington High School interviewed during a recent school lunch said they did not care whether chocolate milk was offered or not.
Eight-year-old Sebastian Ong said chocolate milk is “yummy and delicious,” and the absence of it at school would be “a bummer, but whatever.”
However, banning chocolate milk might not be the best choice for every school, said Marlene Schwartz, director of the University of Connecticut Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity.
“You kind of have to know your student body,” she said.
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