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Good intentions don't go very far when it comes to getting kids to eat healthy lunches, it turns out.

(Andrew Mills/The Star-Ledger)

That saying about leading a horse to water might apply to schoolchildren as well, as Cornell University researchers have discovered.

They took a closer look at what would seem to be a no-brainer: eliminating chocolate milk from school cafeterias. After all, the added sugar in chocolate milk boosts calories without offering more nutrition that regular milk. Take away chocolate milk and kids will drink more white milk, right?

It turns out human behavior isn't that simple. Here's what they discovered when this was tried at 11 Oregon elementary schools:

When denied the choice of chocolate milk, students chose 10 percent less milk. That meant some kids who normally chose chocolate milk switched to white milk, while others simply skipped milk altogether.

Worse than that, even though more students were picking white milk, they were also wasting more of it. There was a 29 percent jump in the amount of milk left on the tray or tossed out.

Nutritionally it worked out to students consuming less sugar and fewer calories....but also less protein and calcium, so hardly a nutritional victory.

Even more mystifying was a 7 percent drop in the number of children participating in the school lunch program.

That means a chocolate milk ban might be a case of harming the good while trying to attain the perfect.

There are ways to include chocolate milk but encourage kids to select white milk, said Brian Wansink, director of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab. Cafeterias can make it easier to select white milk simply by placing it in the front portion of the cafeteria, and to make sure at least one-third to one-half of the milk is white. This makes its selection seem normal and expected, he said.

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