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Home / Sponsored Stories

140,000 kids can't be wrong

18 Aug, 2016 05:00 PM
Maungataroto school children with milk packs

Maungataroto school children with milk packs

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Think about Rio and the swimming pool. Take out the water.
Replace it with good, grass-fed New Zealand milk.

Do that with three more Olympic-sized swimming pools. All that milk adds up to 10 million litres (it takes about 2.5m litres to fill the Rio pool) - which is what's been consumed by more than 140,000 New Zealand primary schoolchildren since 2012.

That's when Fonterra began its Milk For Schools programme, delivering 55 million (and counting) milk cartons to 1455 schools, based on the importance of dairy as a building block to a healthy life and the desire to give Kiwi kids the best possible nutritional start.

Rugby legend Richie McCaw, a Fonterra ambassador, helped launch the programme and New Zealand Principals' Federation executive member Gavin Beere said it was an important educational tool for the children: "Schools play a key role in shaping children's lifestyles. This includes their diets and attitudes towards nutrition, so it's incredible to be able to offer this healthy product every school day."

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He saw milk as a foil for fizzy drinks and said it was preferable to have children well fed at school: "Whether you agree with milk in schools or not, they certainly learn better with a full tummy."

Fonterra's GM Nutrition, Angela Rowan, says medical science has shown the benefits of milk through the life stages and particularly for young children.

"There is good evidence children who include milk in their diet have better health outcomes in terms of bone health, growth and muscle development. There's also been research which proves this is particularly true in extreme conditions.

"A child who does not have enough food, for example, shows clear benefits when even a small amount of milk is introduced to his or her diet."

Dietary advice says we should consume more plant-derived foods but Rowan says that doesn't mean excluding animal sourced foods such as milk which provide important nutrients and complement other plant-derived foods.

Fonterra, in promoting milk, never assumes it is some kind of superfood to be taken in isolation: "What we do say is that milk and dairy foods are a valuable part of a healthy balanced diet. You have to eat a lot of other foods to gain the same sort of nutrients that milk gives you.

"Getting enough calories is not a problem in New Zealand - so it is really all about the quality of those calories."

She also maintains the anti-milk lobby often falls back on misinformation, like the low-fat mantra which many nutrition experts have now discredited.

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"If you look at the US, it has been low-fat everything for 20 years or more - and yet they are getting fatter and so are Australians and Kiwis. So there must be something wrong with the dietary advice to avoid fat. We now know not all fat is bad for you, and it's about eating sensibly and including a variety of foods - all in moderation."

Rowan says fresh minimally processed foods like milk, fruit and vegetables provide a package of nutrients relative to calories, compared to processed foods calorie rich but nutrient poor. Those considering plant alternatives to milk should check what they are buying.

"Read the labels and be careful; if you think you are buying a healthy beverage that replaces the nutrition in milk, check...nutritionally, some of them are little more than sugared water and certainly don't deliver the high quality protein and range of nutrients milk does.

"The whole concept of people consuming dairy and any food group is that a healthy diet is part of the equation. But our health is also the product of a wide range of factors including activity and exercise, our environment, how we live our lives and more - just saying milk is good or bad in isolation is meaningless."

The milk is produced in anything but isolation. Cartons delivered to the schools are the end product of a chain of dedicated people - many of whom are among the 120,000 New Zealanders who rise every day at about 4.30am to begin their day so the rest of us can begin theirs.

Among the subjects of the recent Fonterra "#431AM" campaign were people like Waikato farmer Brendon O'Leary, who says he loves the dawn hours: "Our cowshed faces the morning sun as it comes up, so it shines right into it."

Tanker drivers like Carl Norton also rise before the sun, ferrying the milk to plants where people like Fonterra production supervisor Ross Telfer and his staff process it into various products. Once packaged in cartons, franchisees like Miringa and Nigel Popham come in; they distribute milk around Southland, including to 97 per cent of the region's schools under the Fonterra Milk for Schools programme.

The couple are also up early every day, covering one of the largest regions in the country; Nigel says "seeing the kids so enthusiastic is one of the most rewarding parts of my job".

The Pophams also love the environmental and recycling side of the scheme, where kids take ownership of recycling and used packs are pressed into roof tiles for schools or reincarnated as exercise books.

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