Part of my research is improving the nutritional quality of crops, so I acutely understand how poor nutrition can negatively affect the physical and mental development of children. I worry about children that aren’t getting adequate nutrition, because we need them to be physically and mentally strong to make our country and the world a better place!

I understand that changing things isn’t easy, but if parents came up with an economically feasible plan to improve the nutrition of children, why wouldn’t the school district at least look at it? Why can’t parents with relevant skill sets band together to come up with real solutions? Isn’t that how you made changes to whole grain pasta and lean chicken? With every institution I’ve worked with, the way to make changes is to do the legwork and create a realistic proposal. I don’t think that’s simplistic. I looked at the SFUSD Student Nutrition and Physical Activity Committee but didn’t see anything like sample proposals or sample budgets to help people from other school districts to make changes similar to the ones that you’ve achieved. Can you recommend any other resources?

Regarding HFCS in the milk, while I appreciate the empowerment that the parents feel, I still don’t understand. It’s true that you have to start somewhere, but like Karl said, why exhaust energy on something that won’t actually have a positive effect on the children’s overall diets? Why not just work towards less total sugar in chocolate milk?

But why even spend half of your chocolate milk effort on HFCS and the other half on the total simple sugar content, when you could spend 100% of your effort on the sugar content itself?

After taking a look at your site, and looking for what SFUSFOOD.org has said about corn syrup, I came across this:
“Many researchers believe that high fructose corn syrup may interfere with your metabolism and increase fat storage on the body. Corn syrup is a sugar frequently found as a top ingredient in many of these seemingly healthy snacks”

What researchers are these? Even the scientist who originally proposed that we look into High Fructose Corn Syrup as potentially worse than table sugar has since rejected that hypothesis. Nutritionist Marion Nestle says it is little different from table sugar. Michael Pollan, who used to treat HFCS a little differently in the past, today says “Sugar is sugar.” Indeed, if you were to point to the slightly higher fructose content of HFCS (55% versus 50% in table sugar), fruit juices which come in at 2/3 fructose would be even worse.

What may have happened is that Berkeley Farms thought that they could appease your organization by switching HFCS for sugar, without changing anything else. The result is a ‘victory’ that has not changed anything nutritionally for the kids. You’ve given them an easy way out at the cost of much effort on your part. And by complying with half of your demands, Berkeley Farms may think they’ve already compromised and might be less willing to change their formulation again.

I hope that you are able to affect the sugar content of these drinks in the future, but I worry that the anti-HFCS component of the campaign is going to exhaust time an energy and perhaps even hinder your laudable efforts to improve school lunches.

I don’t recall the costs etc involved (the show may still run on syndication somewhere… not that I can remember the name of it) but frankly, if you can get kids eating fresh fruit and veg, and a relatively balanced diet – even if for only one meal a day, cost effectiveness should take a bit of a back seat – if I remember right the massive reduction in simple sugars correlated pretty strongly to improved behaviour and learning directly after lunch – it’s amazing what you can do by not being whacked out on sugar, be it HFCS or sucrose.