Dearest Dairy Oh!
Oh No You Didn't...
Please tell me you didn't put 'DHA, an omega-3 fatty acid, supports normal development of the brain!' in BIG lettering on your carton of chocolate milk as anything more then a PSA. Based on this, one would think there would be omega-3's in your milk....but there isn't.
At least according to your label, on that very carton, which stated there was 0g of omega-3. Yup, that's 0 as in ZERO.
This isn't my typical product that I purchase but as chocolate milk is no longer offered with pizza day at my son's school I was thinking of surprising him tomorrow. Given that I just attended a webinar on DHA in Maternal and Childhood health (oh yeah...did I not mention I work as a dietitian) I am a little more cognisant of this issue and gravitated toward this...because every bit helps.
But. Come. On.
When the amount is so small that it can't be counted in the Canadian Nutrition Facts table as actually containing the thing you are advertising it contains...maybe you need to look at your product!
I'm not ignorant of the challenges of making a healthy fat (ie omega-3s) fit into a low fat product in adequate amounts. I'm also not ignorant that one can not simply make cows produce a milk higher in Omega-3s, specifically DHA, because we want them to. But maybe, just maybe, you should not offer a 1% chocolate milk if you can't actually get an adequate amount of omega-3s into said milk.
Being the dietitian that I am, I needed more facts, so I went to your website (dairyoh.com). Here it shows that there are 10mg of DHA in 1 cup (8oz) of Neilson Dairy Oh! 1% Chocolate Milk. 10mg doesn't sound all that bad, until you see it as 0.01g - and I suspect that the carton I looked at was even lower otherwise it would have been on the Nutrition Facts Table as 0.01g (anything < 0.01g tends to be listed as 0g).
That isn't even the problem right there for me. The problem is that this is a premium milk and parents are paying a premium for it. Many people now know that omega-3s are good and you use that to imply to parents that this milk - with it's whopping 0.01g of DHA - is going to impact the development of their child's brain.
Well...no....no, not really. You need a wee bit more then that to hit signifiace in all the studies I've looked at. And true you didn't say your milk containined enough omega-3's to make their precous children prodigies, but it was sorta implied that your milk did something for little Bobby's brain.
I take offence to this milk as a parent, consumer of marketed goods and as a dietitian.
Regards,
A disgruntled almost customer
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Wondering where else you can get omega-3's? Eat fish. Fatty fish. Think salmon (wild pacific is best), mackerel, herring & trout. You see 3oz of salmon is often referenced as having about 2g of DHA&EPA - or 2000mg. So a person would have to have 200 cups of milk to equal this 1 serving of salmon. Alternatively if their children don't eat much, they would only have to eat 0.425g (that's like a 200th of a deck of cards) of salmon to get the equivalent of your DHA amount in 1 cup of milk. Also, the omega-3 eggs provide more 'bang for your buck' with 0.4g of omega-3 and 75mg of that being DHA.
