Best Sports Drink for Kids – Not Gatorade

No it’s not Gatorade or Powerade or Vitamin Water. It’s actually something I drank just about every single school day in high school. It’s something I get teased for drinking. It’s something people sometimes give me a hard time about because my kids like it too.

chocolate milk - sports drink for kidsIt’s chocolate milk! Yum 🙂

My kids and I don’t care a whole lot for regular milk, but we can drink lots of chocolate milk.

Someone recently commented at SoftballPerformance.com asking if chocolate milk was really a good after exercise drink. Since then I found out that Canada’s milk industry has utilized the opportunity to promote chocolate milk to athletes on the same level that Gatorade promotes their products to athletes.

Then I came across The Trophy Mom, she’s a sports mom turned blogger. She had me at “sports mom” then she also retweeted me on twitter, so I knew she was a sharp lady. 😉

Anyway, she had an article on her blog about this same topic. She talked about how chocolate milk “has an optimal carbohydrate to protein ratio, essential to restoring muscles and energy, and a bunch of other good stuff like Vitamin D that helps athletic performance and growing kids.”

Whaddya know? So maybe I did know what I was doing in high school. lol  Our school had those soda fountain type drink dispensers. There was no soda, but there was fruit juice, milk, and chocolate milk. Every day at lunch I’d have two glasses of ice cold chocolate milk!  Delicious.

Well, after finding out that chocolate milk may actually be good for athletes, I had to dig a little more and found this CBS News article from 2006 (I know I’m a little behind but stick with me) which says…

A new study shows that plain old chocolate milk may be as good — or better — than sports drinks like Gatorade at helping athletes recover from strenuous exercise.

That’s cool, but obviously I wanted to find something a little more up to date, so I found an article posted just this month at bmedreport.com which states

Grabbing lowfat chocolate milk after a tough workout helped give both trained and amateur athletes a post-exercise training advantage, according to three new studies presented at the American College of Sports Medicine and published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research this month.

Is that cool or what? These people are in the business of finding and understanding what’s good for athletes and even they say low fat chocolate milk (I usually drink 1%) gives athletes a post-exercise training advantage. What athlete doesn’t want an advantage?  This one you can gain without cheating. Just pick up some low fat chocolate milk next time you’re at the grocery store.  I know I will.

photo credit: chocolate milk

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Share Your Thoughts:

Comments 1

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

%d bloggers like this: