Got milk?

In the old days, kids drank milk. We drank it with our meals. Schools supplied little cartons for lunch. It’s what we served our kids at mealtime. Fruit juice was something that you only drank at breakfast—usually orange juice.

That all began to change sometime around the late fifties and early sixties when an influential scientist, Ancel Keys, using what has now been debunked as erroneous “science,” determined that saturated fat was bad for you. The government and nutritionists bought into this notion and encouraged everyone to stop eating fat, including milk, which contains butter fat. Not only that, the government created a food pyramid in which carbohydrates, such as bread, formed the base of the pyramid, telling us that we should eat 6 to 11 servings a day. Because of the fear of fat, mothers switched from giving their kids milk to giving them juice. We now know that the government’s food pyramid was all wrong—that carbohydrates (sugar!) is linked to diabetes, obesity, and heart disease.

Nevertheless, the effect of Key’s influence lingers on and is easy to spot. You rarely see kids drinking milk. Mothers give their kids juice boxes, as do nursery schools. Even government programs designed to provide healthy food for children include juices in their offerings. Studies show that more than half of preschool age children (ages 2 to 5) drink juice regularly, and that they consume on average 10 ounces a day.

Fruit juice is nothing more than a sugary beverage. One 12-ounce glass of orange juice contains 10 teaspoons of sugar, which is roughly the amount in a can of coke. There’s no evidence that shows that fruit juice improves health. Plus it contributes to tooth decay in children. A pediatric dentist reports that he “routinely treats children, as young as 14 months, their upper front teeth destroyed, often beyond repair, by sleeping with or carrying around bottles of juice (among other sugary drinks.) Juice is soda without the bubbles.”

I doubt that milk drinking will ever come back into vogue. Well, I guess you can't go wrong with water.

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