First lady Michelle Obama harvests broccoli with local fifth graders as they participate in the White House Kitchen Garden Fall Harvest in October 2010. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION IS BRINGING BACK whole milk and they want to make damn sure you know about it.
President Trump last week signed the “Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act,” which reverses an Obama-era rule that made federal school lunch funding conditional on the use of skim or low-fat milk. Trump had a jug of milk on his desk when he signed the bill, and was flanked by a bipartisan group of lawmakers from dairy states. Also present was Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who announced in his remarks that “removing whole milk did not improve health, it damaged it.”
Kennedy was there because, a week before, HHS issued new national dietary guidelines, which—in a parallel change to the school lunch law—removed the previous version’s guidance in favor of skim and low-fat milk. To promote the two changes, the administration has produced a series of milk-themed web videos, one featuring AI-generated footage of Kennedy drinking whole milk before dancing in a blissful trance at a nightclub. It was based on an internet meme—you can decide for yourself whether Kennedy’s version is creepy or clever or both. Another video featured swimmer-turned-right-wing-activist Riley Gaines downing a glass and declaring that “the milk mustache is back.”
But there’s something odd about the hyping of the new milk guidance: It’s not as transgressive as Kennedy and those videos would have you believe. For the last two decades, the prevailing scientific sentiment was that steering kids toward lower-fat milks would help to combat obesity. That consensus has been eroding, thanks in part to new research that has convinced some scientists that whole milk can be just as healthy. The latest guidelines track that shift in thinking, which is precisely what scientific updates to the guidelines are supposed to do.
And this is just one example of the new guidelines turning out to be less revolutionary than advertised. Kennedy has been vowing to overhaul the official dietary guidelines ever since he took over HHS, and this month has claimed that his changes will ...
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