Answer: When Rebecca Hodges sent her son to Pre-K in Brooklyn, she was excited for the year to come—full of learning adventures and making new friends. While his education got off to a strong start, Hodges quickly realized something was wrong.
Her son, just five years old, was gaining an alarming amount of weight. Within 6 months, he had gained 11 pounds and his body mass index went from the 60th to the 98th percentile. He began having trouble breathing and sleeping at night. “His diet at home, which was low in sugar, did not change,” she said. “When I brought him to the pediatrician and we started asking him questions about what he was drinking and eating, we realized this was happening because of school.”
Hodges discovered her son was drinking two boxes of chocolate milk a day, each with 20 grams of total sugar, 12 grams of natural sugar from lactose and 8 grams of added sugar. Those 8 grams of added sugar add up to almost one third of a child’s daily sugar allowance according to the American Heart Association and the World Health Organization, which both recommend that children limit sugar to 5 percent of their daily intake —about 6 teaspoons or 25 grams — of added sugar per day.
Hodges’s son is far from a unicorn in the classroom. He is just one of thousands of children growing sick from sugar in a country where the obesity epidemic has reached epic rates and shows no signs of slowing down. Health-care costs related to obesity in this country topped $1.72 trillion dollars in 2018.
In the state of New York, childhood obesity has tripled over the past three decades. In New York City, 40 percent of NYC public school students aged 6 to 12 are overweight or obese. While NYC’s overweight and obesity numbers have been relatively constant over the last 5 years, in communities with underserved populations obesity is on the rise.
Childhood obesity disproportionately affects low-income communities and communities of color. In New York City, children living in the Bronx have the highest prevalence of overweight (43 percent vs. 4 percent in Brooklyn, 40 percent in Staten Island, 39 percent in Queens, 38 percent in Manhattan).
According to the Youth Risk Behavior Survey by the CDC, compared to New York City students, a higher proportion of East and Central Harlem students are overweight and obese. Thirty-five percent of East and Central Harlem students in grades 9-12 are overweight and obese compared to 28 percent in NYC. Obesity rates in low income East Harlem are higher than what they are on the wealthier Upper East Side, just a few short blocks away.
Additionally, according to research reported in Obesity Reviews, obese children and adolescents were approximately “five times more likely to be obese in adulthood than those who were not obese.”
Research also suggests that consuming sweetened beverages such as chocolate milk every day can train a child’s palate to prefer sugar-sweetened foods.
In response, more and more school districts have been removing chocolate milk from their menus. Chocolate milk is banned in Boulder, Minneapolis, Washington D.C., Montgomery County, Maryland, and most recently, San Francisco.
Even New York City’s Department of Corrections (DOC) has phased out sugar-sweetened beverages because of their ties to costly obesity-related diseases. Ten years ago DOC Commissioner Martin Horn told Gothamist, “the move will save money in the long run because healthier inmates will be less prone to strokes, heart attacks or diabetic shock on the city’s watch.” Today, the DOC bans both chocolate milk and juice. And yet, NYC’s Department of Education (DOE) continues to serve chocolate milk (and juice) to 1.1 million children a day. In fact, out of the 1,866 schools within the DOE, only 198 schools opted out of serving chocolate milk in FY 2019.
Rumors have been circulating that DOE may remove chocolate milk from public schools, but it’s deputy press secretary Avery Cohen, would not confirm. She offered this statement: “Our priority is the health and well-being of our students, and every day, we offer a variety of healthy food options that exceed USDA standards. We’ll continue to work with the Department of Education and Department of Health to ensure our meals are nutritious.”
Instead of eliminating chocolate milk as a public health policy, the DOE has outsourced chocolate milk decisions to principals, who may choose to stop serving it in their individual schools. This shifts a huge burden to educators, who want to keep peace with parents of differing views, and who are presumably not health professionals.