7 percent of U.S. adults think chocolate milk comes from brown cows

Sometimes kids who ask where chocolate milk comes from jokingly get told it’s a product of brown cows. But it turns out a startling number of American adults actually believe that’s true.

A recent, nationally representative online survey of more than 1,000 U.S. adults by the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy found that 7 percent believe the color of the cow is what’s responsible for chocolate milk, according to a report from The Washington Post.

The math on that works out to 16.4 million Americans, the Post said. That’s more than five times the population of Kansas.

Forty-eight percent of those who participated in the survey said they weren’t sure of chocolate milk’s origins, according to Food & Wine.

In reality, it’s a mixture of plain white milk, sugar and cocoa.

This story was originally published June 15, 2017 at 4:46 PM with the headline "7 percent of U.S. adults think chocolate milk comes from brown cows."