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It doesn’t matter who we are, we are going to believe something that isn’t true. Perhaps it’s misinformation from another source or maybe it’s just our own mind trying to fit things together and put a square peg in a round hole.

There are times, however, when we learn just how far this issue goes. That came to light in a survey of 1000 Americans and it was discovered that a shocking amount think that chocolate milk comes from brown cows.

Photo: Pixabay/Robert Owen-Wahl

According to Fox 5, the Innovation Center of US Dairy worked along with Edelman Intelligence in an effort to discover if adult Americans knew where chocolate milk came from. The information was posted, and although it wasn’t meant to be a scientific study, the truth is now out there.

The HuffPost reports that the study was conducted in the early part of May 2017. A smattering of people from all across the United States was included in the survey, and the breakdown of where this misinformation came from was “fairly even.”

Photo: PXHERE

When they tallied up the numbers, 7% of those who responded thought that chocolate milk came from brown cows. To put this in perspective, that would mean that 16.4 million people, or 7% of the population in the United States, believe the same thing.

Interestingly, 48% of the 1000 Americans who were asked also didn’t know where chocolate milk came from. Perhaps they thought it was brown cows, but they wouldn’t admit to it.

This wasn’t the first time that Americans came up on the short end of the stick when they were asked about food. For example, the Department Of Agriculture asked adults in the United States in 1993 about the main ingredient in hamburgers. About one out of five didn’t know it was beef.

Photo: Flickr/Cedar Summit Farm License: CC BY-SA 2.0

Elementary students in the United States also are coming up short. When fifth and sixth graders were asked if cows were used to make hamburgers, about 40% didn’t know. Another 30% didn’t realize milk was used to make cheese.

In the same survey, about 50% of elementary school students didn’t realize that lettuce and onions were plants or that pickles were made from small cucumbers.

I guess we have a long way to go.