The US Health and Human Services Secretary's push for whole milk has broad and mainstream appeal. Photo / The Washington Post
The United States Government soured on whole milk half a century ago. Now the Trump Administration wants Americans to drink it up.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy jnr has said for months that he wants the Government to endorse full-fat dairy products, reversing its stance that Americans should consume low-fat milk and cheese to reduce their risk of heart disease, diabetes and obesity.
Federal officials are preparing to allow children to get whole milk at school and through one of the biggest food assistance programmes, according to a leaked draft of the White House’s “Make Our Children Healthy Again Strategy”.
The embrace of whole milk fits into Kennedy’s movement to “Make America Healthy Again”, which challenges established nutritional thinking and promotes food with little processing.
Unlike some of Kennedy’s challenges to established science – such as promoting raw milk and blasting the childhood immunisation schedule – his push for whole milk has broad and mainstream appeal.
It unites the secretary’s ‘Maha’ supporters, industry groups and many nutritionists, who describe the Government’s stance on fat as out of sync with the latest science.
New research offers mounting evidence that full-fat milk, cheese, and yoghurt offer their own health benefits and aren’t less healthy than low-fat versions.
Some experts argue that more evidence is needed before abandoning decades of guidance promoting low-fat dairy options, but others say that time has come.
“Dairy fat was given a wrongful conviction in 1980,” said Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist and director of Tufts University’s Food Is Medicine Institute.
“Forty-five years later, I think that wrongful conviction might be overturned, and dairy fat returned to the land of the living.”
For decades, Americans have been told by doctors to favour low-fat dairy – a recommendation rooted in fears that saturated fat and excess calories were fuelling an epidemic of obesity and heart disease.
This became Government doctrine, enshrined in a 1977 Senate nutrition report and the first federal dietary guidelines, published in 1980.
But researchers have grown sceptical.
Randomised controlled trials have never offered definitive evidence that low-fat milk is healthier than whole milk.
A growing body of research highlights the potential health benefits of whole-fat dairy, including improved glucose tolerance, enhanced satiety and slow digestion.
“The body of evidence does not support differentiation between regular-fat and low-fat dairy foods in dietary guidelines for both adults and children,” a team of international scientists wrote in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in a perspective article published in May.
In a report last year, an expert committee convened by the federal Government to review dietary guidelines said replacing one type of dairy product with another doesn’t reduce the risk of heart disease.
Yet it concluded that the evidence is still insufficient to reverse long-standing guidelines endorsing low-fat or skim milk.
Right now, those guidelines say saturated fat – the kind found in whole milk – should make up no more than 10% of a person’s total daily calories. That guidance is largely echoed by the American Heart Association, the American Academy of Paediatrics and the World Health Organisation.
Kennedy has criticised the federal dietary guidelines, calling them “antiquated” and promising to do away with them. Influencers who have amplified Kennedy’s messaging also questioned the long-standing guidance for milk products.
Mark Hyman, a metabolic health doctor who is close to Kennedy, argues that saturated fats from whole foods aren’t necessarily harmful.
In his 2016 book Eat Fat, Get Thin, he wrote that people should instead avoid the trans fats and refined vegetable oils found in processed foods.
Casey Means, President Donald Trump’s nominee for surgeon-general, and her brother Calley, a Kennedy adviser, have said people should drink grass-fed, organic whole milk.
Joe Rogan, who hosted Kennedy last year on his popular podcast, has called full-fat dairy “quite healthful”.
These arguments have the backing of some mainstream nutrition experts. Mozaffarian said the low-fat recommendations were based on “crude studies” that failed to recognise that saturated fats in dairy don’t increase disease risk, unlike saturated fat found in red meat.
Erin Ogden, an expert on child nutrition programmes at the Centre for Science in the Public Interest, said it’s too early to draw that conclusion.
“We’re not swayed to change our stance on our concerns with saturated fat,” Ogden said.
“There hasn’t been enough evidence indicating that what the source of saturated fat is changes the impact on the body.”
Emily Oster, an economist who has called many of Kennedy’s actions performative, has said there’s no clear choice for which level of fat in milk is best for children.
Oster, founder of the popular parenting website ParentData, points to a 2020 meta-analysis of 28 studies.
In 18 of the studies, children who drank whole milk were less likely to be overweight, but in the others, the type of milk made no difference.
“Ultimately, it seems that the type of milk may not dramatically impact a child’s weight, and personal preference plays a big role,” she wrote.
Kennedy’s condemnation of some types of foods, including ones that are ultra-processed or contain artificial dyes or seed oils, has prompted fierce industry pushback.
Dairy farmers praise his push for whole milk, which could boost their overall sales.
“It’s time for federal nutrition policy to catch up with the science,” Andrew Jerome, vice-president of communications at the International Dairy Foods Association, wrote in an email.
Miquela Hanselman, director of regulatory affairs for the National Milk Producers Federation, said federal officials should follow consumers’ lead.
“As newer science has come out that supports healthy fats in your diet, you’re seeing people shift back to those higher-fat products,” she said.
Americans are still more likely to buy 2% milk, but sales of whole milk have slowly risen in the past decade after years of decline.
The industry hopes the Trump Administration will advance two major policy changes it has pushed for years: allowing whole and 2% milk to be included in school lunches and purchased through the Women, Infant and Children’s programme, which subsidises food for low-income mothers and young children.
Both are included as “food deregulation” priorities in the draft policy blueprint of the Make America Healthy Again Commission, a panel to address childhood chronic disease that is chaired by Kennedy.
The White House and HHS would not comment on the report, which is expected to be publicly released in the coming weeks. HHS referred a question on whether the Administration supports removing restrictions on whole and 2% milk in school lunches and the WIC programme to a spokesperson for the Agriculture Department, who said that “the guidelines will prioritise whole, healthy and nutritious foods”.
Most public schools have been banned from offering higher-fat milk since President Barack Obama signed a 2010 law requiring school lunches to comply with federal dietary guidelines. The WIC programme also adheres to the guidelines, which means parents cannot use the programme to buy whole milk for children aged 2 and older.
Kennedy has promised to overhaul the dietary guidelines by the end of the year.
He has argued that the guidelines are way too long, at 149 pages, and should instead consist of four to five pages that stress the need to eat whole foods, including foods that contain saturated fat.
“I grew up in a world where milk was the healthiest thing you could eat,” Kennedy said at a July news conference about removing natural dyes from ice cream. “There’s been an attack on whole milk and cheese and yoghurt over the past couple of decades.”
Kennedy said the upcoming dietary guidelines will “elevate those products to where they ought to be in terms of contributing to the health of our children”.
While the experts who reviewed the dietary guidelines suggested limiting saturated-fat intake, Trump officials have said those fats have been unfairly demonised.
Kennedy and other officials in the Trump Administration have said little about milk flavoured with chocolate or strawberry, which is widely seen as unhealthy and contains twice as much sugar as whole milk.
Flavoured milk can be offered in schools as long as it’s reduced fat. Under the first Trump Administration, USDA loosened those rules to allow 1% flavoured milk in addition to skim flavoured milk. The dairy industry lobbied heavily for that change, saying it would boost milk drinking among children.
Neither Kennedy nor the Maha report has proposed rolling that back.
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