This is the kind of thing parents who are not dietitians and biochemists are up against:

So here’s a registered dietitian telling parents to serve their children chocolate milk as snacks, actually suggesting that kids need a post-game sports drink (they certainly don’t) and that it ought to be chocolate milk, that kids who are lactose intolerant get calcium and vitamin D from fortified juices (despite calls to limit juice consumption in children to 1/2 – 1 cup daily) and that basically any dish that can be spiked with milk should be. Dietitians — a question for you

The dietitian is concerned kids aren’t getting enough calcium, so he or she is recommending that we get calcium into kids even if it’s in the form of sugared drinks — which, just about everyone agrees, puts the child at greater risk for obesity. So the blog item I’m linking to is deeply concerned that if we give kids too much milk that we’ll make them fat.

This is not an unusual occurrence; diet advice is not only conflicting and confusing, but often delivered with histrionics and dire threats of crippling disease if the advice is not followed to the letter. Elf’s Ideal Pregnancy Diet is compiled from all the dietary advice she got from her doctors while pregnant; it’s clearly impossible to follow.

The state of dietary research is miserable. Either we know next to nothing or what we know gets so drowned out by people who have marketing or political agendas that it’s no longer recognizable as fact.