CT Wants to Ban Whole Milk and Juices in Daycare

Lawmakers in Connecticut are proposing a bill that would prohibit day care centers from giving children whole milk and would restrict how much juice a child can drink while at a day care facility.

According to the bill, the proposed restrictions on child day care centers are "to establish certain nutrition standards for child care settings and early education programs."

This proposal comes in the wake of national attention to childhood obesity, where the federally-run Healthy Habits Program has been gaining steam and recognition, even while studies show that U.S. children are still facing high cholesterol troubles that will likely lead to health problems later in life.

If the bill were to be passed, day care facilities would no longer be able to serve sugary drinks and juices to children. This change alone is expected to be found acceptable by all Connecticut law makers, as even the World Health Organization has recently changed its stance on the dangers of added sugars, now stating that the average person should be consuming half the added sugar levels that were recommended last year, in order to ensure a healthy weight and heart.

 However, the bill does not stop there. State Senator Catherine Osten, state Representative Roberta Willis, and state Representative David Zoni have proposed that all day care facilities be banned from providing children with any milk beverage with a higher fat content than what is naturally found in skim milk. According to the senators, this change would be made in the interest of ensuring that young children do not consume too much fatty product per-day.

However, critics of the bill are already questioning just what makes skim milk that much better. Eric Boehm, a watchdog.com investigative journalist and columnist writes that despite its lower fat content, skim milk comes with its own brand of bad.

"Skim milk is pretty disgusting because it's processed a whole lot more than whole milk," Boem writes. "All those treatments might actually make skim milk worse for you because they oxidize the cholesterol in the milk and make it easier for your body to absorb it."

And Boem is not alone in his criticisms. A study published last year in the Archives of Disease in Childhood, set out to conclusively determine that drinking skim milk helps children maintain a healthy weight. However, things didn't turn out as researchers had expected.

"We were really surprised when we looked at the data and it was very clear that within every ethnicity and every socioeconomic strata, that it was actually the opposite, that children who drank skim milk and 1% were heavier than those who drank 2% and whole," study author Dr. Mark Daniel DeBoer told Time magazine.

Of course, the study only established an association with minor weight gain and skim milk and did not explain why. Still, DeBoer claimed that the association alone is enough to say that skim milk does not absolutely ensure weight control -- contrary to what Connecticut lawmakers appear to think.

The study was published in the Archives of Disease in Childhood, a British Medical Journal publication, on March 18, 2013.

The Ct. bill was proposed during the February session of 2014.