Is chocolate milk better than expensive recovery products? There is a fair amount of research saying so.) Some of it funded by dairy companies.) But maybe the lesson is really that recovery products aren't any more special than food, any kind, with the right nutrient balance. In that case, chocolate milk might be effective, but no more so than other foods.

So we'll look at what chocolate milk is made of, and compare its ingredients (and its overall effects) to those in recovery products, and to what you might be able to get in a meal you put together from real foods after your workout.

The research on chocolate milk is mainly on recovery: if you drink chocolate milk, versus something else, after one workout, do you perform any better in your next one? This is an especially important question for endurance athletes and for anyone who does workouts in quick succession (morning and afternoon, for example, or people with busy schedules who cram their two hardest workouts of the week into the weekend).

Muscles store carbohydrate in the form of chains of sugars called glycogen. Glycogen is used during exercise, and replenished best when you eat or drink something right after your workout. (Eating during a workout also helps, since sugar will be available in your bloodstream and your body doesn't have to use as much of the stored glycogen.) Replace that glycogen quickly, and you'll be well prepared for your next workout.

The science behind chocolate milk

Most of the studies that show athletes performing better or synthesizing more glycogen after drinking chocolate milk look promising, but they're comparing the beverage to a carbohydrate-only drink, or to water.

To take a few examples trumpeted from the "Got Chocolate Milk?" website (funded by the Milk Processor Education Program, part of the dairy industry), runners were able to run 23 percent longer after recovering with chocolate milk versus the control drink. Cyclists were able to cycle longer and with more power. Swimmers shaved two seconds off their 200-meter swim times.

But here's what these studies all had in common: they were comparing chocolate milk to a carbohydrate-only drink or a "typical sports drink," something like Gatorade. If you were previously chugging Gatorade or, I don't know, Kool-Aid after your workouts, this might be news to you. But most of us know that a carbohydrate-protein mixture (like chocolate milk) replenishes glycogen better than carbs alone. That means the fairly large body of evidence on the benefits of chocolate milk amounts to a great big "duh."

What about muscle growth? It's well established that post-workout protein helps muscle protein synthesis (aka muscle growth), and that a carb/protein mixture is better than protein alone since that also meets goals for glycogen replenishment (carbs and protein beat plain carbs in most trials).

Let's take a closer look at the carbs and protein. The ratio of carbs to protein in chocolate milk is 4:1, a number sometimes held in high regard, but you can get carbs and protein in that approximate ratio from any of a variety of foods. Rice with a sprinkling of shredded chicken would do the trick. (Heck, whole-wheat bread comes pretty close.) In fact, as long as you get a decent dose of protein, the exact ratio doesn't matter.

But the type of carbohydrate might. When researchers compared chocolate milk to a commercial drink with the same carb-to-protein ratio (Endurox R4) and to Gatorade, both chocolate milk and Gatorade outperformed Endurox, leaving the researchers scratching their heads and saying maybe the difference is in the type of sugar. The glycogen in our bodies is made of glucose, so workout supplements like Endurox and Surge typically use glucose as their main carbohydrate.

Oddly, other sugars seem to work better for recovery than glucose. These include sucrose (table sugar), and lactose (the sugar naturally found in milk). Chocolate milk and sports drinks are often sweetened with either sucrose or high-fructose corn syrup, or sometimes a mixture of sugars. A quick note about high-fructose corn syrup: Despite the reputation, it's biochemically very similar to sucrose. Both are terrible for couch potatoes to chug all day long, but both work just fine as a carbohydrate source in post-workout drinks.

The bottom line here is that chocolate milk is no worse than products made for recovery, and may be better (while definitely being cheaper). But is chocolate milk special compared to other foods? Probably not.

It seems that if you get the right balance of macronutrients, it may not matter where they come from. A recent study compared post-workout meals of sports products (including PowerBars and Clif Shot Bloks) with what you might get stopping at McDonald's on the way home: hotcakes and orange juice, followed a bit later by a burger and fries. (Both meals had a 7:1 carb-to-protein ratio.) The meals produced identical performance in a cycling time trial later that day, showing that it's the nutrients, not the brand name on the wrapper, that really matter.