Each year on September 27th folks enjoy a tall, frosty glass to celebrate National Chocolate Milk Day.
- An Irish physician named Sir Hans Sloane is the inventor of chocolate milk. Doctor and collector Sir Hans Sloane created the concoction all the way back in 1687.
- Sloane brought back his chocolate milk recipe with him back to England from Jamaica, where it was manufactured and sold as medicine.
- According to some historians, the Jamaicans were brewing “a hot beverage brewed from shavings of freshly harvested cacao, boiled with milk and cinnamon” as far back as 1494.
- Chocolate has been known to humans as far back as 350 BC.
- Europeans had known about chocolate since 1502 when Columbus brought it back from his conquests in the Americas — although it wasn’t until Cortez pillaged the Aztecs in 1516 that Europeans actually figured out what to do with cacao.
- Chocolate milk can boost calcium and vitamin D, which research shows are important for preserving cartilage and joint health.
- Research has found that cacao actually contains antibacterial agents that fight tooth decay. The problem is that the things that are added such as sugar and milk can still cause cavities.
- Drinking one large glass after you work out will boost muscle growth and speed recovery.
- There are 5 milligrams of caffeine in each mini carton of chocolate milk.
- People think chocolate milk comes from brown cows? According to a study, 7% of Americans think this is true.
- John Cadbury, and sons George and Richard, later purchased Sloane’s milk chocolate. The Cadburys were Quakers who viewed chocolate as a nourishing, healthy alternative to alcohol and promoted it as a healthy “flesh forming substance”.
- In order to enhance its popularity, the Cadbury Brothers promoted their Sloane recipe as a “health food” with rhetoric claiming that to call it a “medication would not be too strong a term”. By diluting chocolate’s singular nature with the addition of milk, its primary use as a medicine began to murkily blur with its use as a food.
- Nesquik is a brand of products made by the Swiss company Nestlé. In 1948, Nestlé launched a drink mix for chocolate-flavored milk called Nestle Quik in the United States. This was released in Europe during the 1950s as Nesquik. Since 1999, the brand has been known as Nesquik worldwide.
- One study in 49 elementary schools found that total milk consumption dropped an average of 35 percent when flavored milk was eliminated. Consumption dropped because fewer students were selecting milk at all, and more of the white milk that was selected was discarded.
- Another smaller study in 11 elementary schools found when chocolate milk was banned from the cafeteria, milk sales declined by almost 10 percent, 30 percent of the white milk was thrown away, and 7 percent fewer students chose to eat school lunches!
- Two actors who got a big career boost from chocolate milk: Adam West and Peter Billingsley. The former starred as a spy mascot named Captain Quik in the early-1960s advertisements for Nestle Quik chocolate milk mix. That got the attention of producers of a new Batman TV series.
- About two decades later, Billingsley, best known for A Christmas Story, was all over TV as Hershey’s Syrup commercial character “Messy Marvin.”
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