Editorial

Got Milk (The Healthy Kind)

Last September, when the city replaced most whole milk offerings in schools with one percent and skim milk in the public schools, little notice was paid. But it was a hard-won, homegrown victory for kids’ health that was led by a group of Bronx health advocates, educators and parents.

There’s eight less grams of fat and 54 less calories in a kid-sized carton of skim milk than in whole milk. Add that up over the course of a 180-day school year and you begin to get the picture.

Many kids eat three meals a day at their school; and most eat at least two. So, it’s an obvious place to have an impact on what kids put into their systems.

Interventions like this are critical if the city is going to have any chance of significantly improving its alarming child obesity and diabetes statistics.

The effort began small at PS 28 in Mt. Hope. A committee organized by Montefiore’s School Health Program, which runs a health center at the school, was focused on getting one percent and skim milk into the school. But in a re-centralized school system — where most decisions are made downtown at the Education Department’s Tweed headquarters — that’s easier said than done. (The positive side of that is that an effort that began at a single local school affected policy system-wide.)

Downtown, there was the predictable bureaucratic bridling whenever people try to get a system of a million-plus school children to make a wholesale change in policy, not to mention the dairy industry, which feared a sharp dip in milk consumption by kids who missed their chocolate milk. The city countered with a plan to introduce less fattening vanilla and strawberry milk, but that wasn’t good enough for the advocates. Those milks still had way too much sugar and calories.

But, in the end, the city did the right thing. A few months after they began working on the issue about a year ago, advocates sat down with David Berkowitz, director of school food, late last summer. Berkowitz asked each person to go around the table to make their case for the strict low-fat milk proposal. When they made their collective case, Berkowitz agreed to do it their way. The advocates were stunned and exultant. The new policy took effect immediately with the opening of school in September. Some Bronx schools still have low-fat chocolate milk on the menu for lunch a couple days a week, but whole milk has been totally banished from the system.

The program is a huge success. There’s been a 5 percent decline in milk consumption but no reduction at all in overall meal consumption, something some critics of the plan feared.

Megan Charlop, a Norwood resident who works at Montefiore’s School Health Program and helped lead the charge for the new policy, says the victory is an important one, but that it’s only one step in improving children’s nutrition.

Getting kids to eat well outside of school is, of course, key. To that end, advocates have launched the bodega campaign to get local markets to stock low-fat milk (see illustration at right).

They would also like to see those Snapple vending machines stocked only with water so that kids don’t drink the sugary juice.

Giving kids back their play yards, many of which are now occupied by portable classrooms, would be another huge advance in the cause of children’s health. This is, of course, tied in to the larger fight for securing the city’s fair share of state education funds.

In the meantime, we should all be proud that this initiative was hatched right here in the Bronx — by a variety of groups including Montefiore, Jacobi, St. Barnabas and Bronx Health Reach. It’s a victory that will result in healthier kids who will become healthier adults as they carry on better eating habits that began in school.

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