Analysis Of Please Stop Asking Your Children To Finish Their Milk

Milk is something we’ve been told forever is essential in our diets. Consuming a few glasses of milk a day is encouraged and promoted by food experts and doctors. We are told that milk is needed for strong bones and calcium. There are also some people who say milk isn’t necessary and even some who say it’s bad for us. In his article, “Please Stop Asking Your Children to Finish Their Milk”, Yoni Freedhoff talks about his take on milk consumption. His opinion is that multiple glasses of milk everyday is excessive and he doesn’t even think drinking milk has to be an everyday, or even every few days type of thing. Freedhoff’s central argument is that milk should be more of a treat or occasional drink. He makes the point that “milk does …show more content…
He does this when he compares milk to soda. These two drinks seem very different, but he still talks about how 2 percent milk has 27% more calories than a can of Coca-Cola. Another thing he mentions is how milk contains more sugar than soda, which doesn’t make much sense. He does let us know that milk’s sugar is in the form of lactose, but his claims on it containing more sugar than soda still seem a little misleading. Freedhoff makes another strange comparison between flavored milk and pies. He says “proponents of milk’s health-promoting properties are so enamored with the white stuff that they’ll even recommend children drink flavored milk, where flavor tends to come from obscene amounts of added sugar.” Then he compares this to giving pies to children who don’t like fruit. Fruit and fruit pies are completely different than milk and flavored milk. Freedhoff is making this argument in order to make flavored milk seem scary to parents reading this article. Another rhetorical strategy Freedhoff uses is making proponents of milk seem like “the bad guys” or the less informed. The language he uses to describe pro-milk people is more negative. In the flavored milk and fruit pies comparison, Freedhoff talks about how proponents of milk are “enamored with the white stuff”. By using the word “enamored”, he’s making milk proponents …show more content…
Through his research, Freedhoff has come to the conclusion that people shouldn’t force their children to drink milk because the health benefits just aren’t outstanding. He wants parents to stop asking their kids to finish their glasses of milk because he thinks this is the “right” thing to do. Freedhoff could have taken on this argument from various perspectives, but the reason he chose to present his point from a health and nutrition angle is due to his medical and health based background. Yoni Freedhoff is an assistant professor in family medicine at a university. He also runs his own blog called “Weighty Matters” and is committed to weight management