The Surprisingly Perfect Post-Workout Drink

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Sam Dean, Bon Appétit

When we were kids, chocolate milk was a pediatrician-approved "trick" Mom used to help us get our daily calcium. Those were the days. Now chocolate milk is majorly in the doghouse thanks to the childhood obesity epidemic (cue Jamie Oliver filling an entire school bus with metaphorical sugar), and schools in major cities like Los Angeles have banned it.

So we were happy to see our cocoa-flavored friend get a little good press recently: A nutritionist at the University of Texas at Austin recently found that low-fat chocolate milk is the ideal beverage for recovering between workouts. Nice.

According to Dr. John Ivy's research, the added sugar of the chocolate ups the milk's carb-to-protein ratio to 3:1, which lets the body benefit from exercise better than typical sports drinks, un-chocololated milk (that might not be the technical term), or plain water.

The study was paid for by the National Dairy Council, so take your carbs n' protein with a grain of salt, but Dr. Ivy is a well-respected name in the nutrition world.

Plus, we've been looking for an excuse to drink this stuff ever since that whole "kids need calcium" bit stopped working.