Is Chocolate Milk Healthy for Kids?

Chocolate milk: To drink or not to drink? That's the hot-button issue on the minds of school officials, parents, and nutrition experts across the country.

The debate over whether chocolate milk should be served in school cafeterias — and whether it's healthy — reared its head again when the Los Angeles Unified School District announced it would ban chocolate- and strawberry-flavored milk from its schools starting this summer. Superintendent John Deasy pushed for the ban with influence from celebrity chef and food activist Jamie Oliver, who has said that flavored milk has as much sugar as a candy bar.

In April, The Washington Post reported that Fairfax County, Va., schools would reintroduce chocolate milk after they banned it (along with D.C. schools) last year. The new, reformulated chocolate milk is low-fat and contains less sugar than previous versions (and the sugar is from sugar cane or beets instead of the more processed high-fructose corn syrup).

But the chocolate milk controversy is bigger than just school policy. Chocolate milk is higher in sugar and calories than non-flavored milk, but some kids simply refuse to drink plain milk. (According to dairy industry data, milk consumption in 58 schools dropped by an average of 35 percent when flavored milk was removed or limited.)

So are kids better off consuming the extra sugar and calories in chocolate milk than not consuming any milk — a vital source of calcium, vitamin D, and other vital nutrients — at all?

Finding good information on chocolate milk is no easy task. Google delivers forceful agenda-driven arguments both for and against. There's milk boosterism from the dairy industry, of course - their message should be considered carefully, as they have a financial stake in people drinking chocolate milk. There's also a healthy serving of hardline anti-milk hucksterism from alternative medicine blogs, paleo diet evangelists, and cranks claiming that cutting out the milk protein casein can cure autism.

First, the arguments from the pro-dairy crowd: chocolate milk, despite high sugar content, can protect against cavities. That's reasonably well supported in the research - chocolate milk is an important source of calcium, which helps to protect teeth, and there's some evidence that it replaces more sugary drinks in the diet. You should still check the labels on chocolate milk to ensure that you're picking a brand with relatively low added sugar. Remember also to consider dietary sugar in context; consume too much overall, and you up your risk of a wide range of health problems.

There's also good evidence that chocolate milk is an effective post-workout recovery drink - especially after endurance sports like running, swimming, or cycling. There's water, so it helps to replenish what you've sweated out; chocolate milk has a 4:1 carbohydrate to protein ratio, which is ideal for the helping your muscles to re-up on stored energy. There's not a huge body of research behind the notion of chocolate milk as a recovery drink, and the idea has been aggressively promoted by the dairy industry, but the science so far supports it.

What the science doesn't support is the notion that casein, the protein component in chocolate milk, is the cause of "recurrent childhood ear infections, eczema, chronic bronchitis, asthma, and sinus conditions." That's the claim made by livingtraditionally.com - a hotbed of misinformation, pseudoscience, and fear-mongering. Anya Vien, who runs the site, claims also that casein contributes to or causes autism; that's not true. She supports the theory that rBGH can cause a whole rash of disorders and problems in humans; while it's not great for cows, there's little to no evidence to support that claim, as we've laid out in a separate post.

She also claims that milk blocks calcium absorption and actually drains calcium from the bones by increasing the body's "metabolic acidity;" there's no such thing as metabolic acidity - that's not how acids and bases work in the body - and the majority of research still says that drinking milk fortifies bones, provides calcium, and lowers risk of osteoporosis.

She supports the calcium-draining claim with an as-yet unexplained paradox that actually is borne out in the data - that countries with lower dairy consumption have correspondingly lower rates of osteoporosis. That much seems to be true, although the scientific literature has not yet proven or disproven that average national milk consumption is causal rather than simply correlated; we don't know why this is the case, or that milk is behind it, since a wealth of other research indicates that milk consumption fights osteoporosis.

There are some real concerns with chocolate milk: it's rich in saturated fats and cholesterol, which should be limited and properly balanced in your diet - otherwise, you up your risk of diabetes, heart disease, and other problems. Most adults can't break down lactose and will experience discomfort if they drink it. The Swedes have found that excessive milk consumption can up cancer risk in cohort studies. Finally, the dairy industry uses a lot of antibiotics on their cows - that contributes to antibiotic resistance, which is bad for all of us.


Chocolate Milk vs. Regular Milk

All milk — flavored or not — is packed with nutrients. One cup of fortified low-fat milk contains around 100 calories and 13 grams of sugar (in the form of lactose, a sugar found naturally in milk) and about 300 milligrams of calcium (about 25 percent of kids' daily need) as well as vitamin D, vitamin A, B vitamins, and minerals like potassium and phosphorus. The same size serving of typical low-fat chocolate milk contains about 160 calories and 25 grams of sugar (the increased amount comes from added sugar), with comparable levels of vitamins and minerals.

It may not seem like a huge difference, but over time that extra sugar and calories add up, especially when they're consumed daily at school and as part of an already too-sugary diet, explains Joy Bauer, RD, nutrition and health expert for the Today show and Everyday Health. A recent Emory University study found that added sugar accounts for 20 percent of teens' daily calories; those with the highest sugar intake had lower levels of "good" HDL cholesterol and higher levels of "bad" LDL cholesterol and triglycerides, and a higher risk of heart disease and diabetes later in life. Much of the teens' sugar intake came from sweetened beverages, the study authors said.