At a Head Start classroom in Alexandria this spring, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. did more than just stage a photo-op — he underscored his department’s initiatives to prioritize healthy eating and nutrition. The forefront of that commitment? Allowing whole milk to be sold in schools. “We are encouraging programs to switch from low-fat dairy — which the antiquated Dietary Guidelines require them to promote — to full-fat/whole milk,” Kennedy wrote on X.
Months later, Kennedy’s fight for full-fat dairy products persists. In July, he announced plans to overhaul dairy recommendations in the federal dietary guidelines, which are expected to be updated by the end of 2025. As of recently, federal officials are gearing up to allow whole milk to be served at schools and through one of the nation’s biggest food assistance programs, according to a leaked draft of the White House’s “Make Our Children Healthy Again Strategy,” first obtained by The Washington Post.
“I grew up in a world where milk was the healthiest thing that you could eat,” Kennedy said at a July news conference. “There’s a tremendous amount of emerging science that talks about the need for more protein in our diet and more fats in our diet. And there’s no industry that does that better than this industry.”
During its first term, the Trump administration rolled back Obama-era school lunch regulations to allow one percent and skim flavored milks to be served in schools after only reduced-fat flavored milks were permitted. But whole milk is an entirely different challenge, considering that it was effectively removed from U.S. school meals more than a decade ago.
That raises the question: Can Kennedy truly bring back whole milk?
This isn’t just a debate about dairy. With childhood obesity rates climbing and dietary guidelines long dominated by low-fat orthodoxy, Kennedy’s campaign threatens to upend decades of federal nutrition policy. At stake is not only what children sip at lunch but also who gets to decide the rules for healthy eating — and whether emerging science or political ideology shapes those choices.
“A small uptick in cow’s milk intake is, obviously, not tantamount to the calamities that have been unleashed over the last six weeks in American politics,” wrote Vox’s Marina Bolotnikova back in March. “But it does likely sprout, at least in part, from the same vibe shift that’s given us butter-churning, homestead-tending tradwives, an unscientific turn against plant-based foods, and a movement to destroy public trust in vaccines.”
In 2010, Congress passed the Hunger-Free Kids Act, which prohibited whole milk in school lunches due to concerns that saturated fat and high calories were contributing to a slew of health problems in children. Whether whole milk can be neatly classified as “bad” remains an ongoing debate. In 1977, the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs issued “Dietary Goals for the United States,” a set of nutritional guidelines that suggested reducing saturated fat consumption — including high-fat dairy products — based on scientific review and debate.
Although whole milk’s reputation has improved over the years, recent guidelines and expert groups still recommend lowering the consumption of saturated fat. Per the Center for Science in the Public Interest, the 2020 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee found “strong evidence” that children who consumed diets lower in both saturated fat and cholesterol had lower levels of LDL cholesterol (often referred to as “bad” cholesterol) throughout childhood. Groups like the American Heart Association, American College of Cardiology and National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute recommend low-fat dairy products over high-fat, the non-profit watchdog added. The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, the American Heart Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics further recommend children ages two or older drink low-fat or fat-free milk.
Kennedy’s endorsement of whole milk is part of his “Make America Healthy Again” campaign, which aims to end childhood chronic disease by challenging established stances on nutrition and increasing transparency on food and drug quality. He has proposed shortening current dietary guidelines from 149 pages to four or five pages that emphasize the importance of eating whole foods, including foods that contain saturated fat, The Washington Post reported.
According to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), dietary guidelines recommend individuals ages nine and older have three cups of dairy daily or lactose-free or fortified soy alternatives. Additionally, children ages one to eight are encouraged to have between between 1.6 cups and 2.5 cups, depending on their age.
“About 90% of Americans do not get enough dairy. Most people would benefit from getting more fat-free or low-fat dairy,” the agency said. “This can come from milk, yogurt, or cheese. It can also come from lactose-free milk and fortified soy milk or yogurt.”
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Dairy consumption has drastically changed over the years — even in recent months. Plant-based milks, despite existing for millennia, rose to global popularity amid the 21st century due to growing concerns of lactose intolerance and the environmental impacts of dairy. Non-dairy milk has become so commonplace and normalized that a handful of coffee chains have stopped charging extra for such plant-based alternatives.
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In 2024, however, dairy producers enjoyed a surge in production, selling about 0.8 percent more milk than in the year prior, according to USDA statistics. It’s a shocking number, to say the least, considering that it also marked the first year-over-year increase since 2009, when milk prices suffered a historic drop due to the Great Recession. Not to mention that sales of raw milk — another beverage that Kennedy is a vocal proponent of — increased 20 to 65 percent since last year, according to the market research firm NielsenIQ. Sales prevailed despite an outbreak of bird flu in dairy cows and numerous warnings from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which has called raw milk one of the “riskiest” foods to consume.
“After achieving ubiquity in the 2010s and early 2020s, plant-based milks may have lost their cool, nonconformist quality — much like how, after more than a decade of liberal cultural supremacy, embracing authoritarian revanchism now feels like countercultural rebellion,” Bolotnikova wrote.
Dairy consumption is inherently political, whether that concerns federal dietary guidelines or the environmental ramifications of drinking more cow’s milk. As explained by Bolotnikova, consumers have been opting for cow’s milk due to inflation (cow’s milk is cheaper than any plant-based milk sold in stores) and a growing skepticism of so-called ultra-processed foods — food choices that are furthering the conservative agenda.
Whether Kennedy succeeds or not, the battle over whole milk is less about what children drink at lunch and more about who gets to define what “healthy” even means.
