Chocolate milk may have returned from the realm of banned candy and chips to be sold once more in Calgary schools — as it is in Toronto — but whether or not the beloved beverage can be purchased in schools may be irrelevant according to an American study released Tuesday.
The study found selling junk food in schools doesn’t affect weight gain in middle-schoolers.
“We expected to find a definitive connection,” said the study’s lead author Jennifer Van Hook from Pennsylvania State University. They even delayed publication of the results for two years because they were so surprised.
The results mean “we need to be looking far beyond schools, and more specifically junk food sales in schools, to make a difference,” said Van Hook.
But serving and teaching children about healthy food helps them make healthy choices for the rest of their lives, said David Farnell, the CEO of Real Food For Real Kids, which caters healthy food to elementary schools.
“Schools need to send a message,” he said, even if the kids are loading up on chips from home and Chinese takeout at lunch time off school grounds.
In September, Ontario put strict guidelines in schools that ban high-fat, high-sugar and high-sodium food from being sold on school property. Lean chicken burgers on whole wheat buns replaced hamburgers.
But some say the anti-junk food campaign goes a bit too far. Bake sales, for instance, can’t happen anymore unless all the items meet the nutrition requirements. Though as a concession there are 10 exemption days allotted for schools to serve anything they want.
Toronto dietitian Mary Bamford says schools should make the healthy choice the easy choice. But it’s not easy.
“Having a class party with cookies and cake to celebrate can be part of a healthy eating culture … But the question is: how often?” she said. “It’s about finding a balance.”
In Los Angeles, the transition to healthy school menu is seeing a much stronger student backlash than in Toronto.
Meals including quinoa, pad thai and white milk are being tossed away uneaten, and students complain of hunger and headaches, reports the Los Angeles Times.
The key is that “it’s important to talk about everything in moderation … and it’s about the awareness,” says George Kourtis, the TDSB Health and Physical Education Program Coordinator. Like making kids aware of nutrition so they can look at chocolate milk and see for themselves what the sugar content is.
To read this article on the Toronto Star, click here.