Milk, what is it good for?

The Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement had an interesting press conference Tuesday in which many members of the Trump administration called for whole milk to be available in schools again. USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins said that the the 2025 Dietary Guidelines, set to be released before the end of the year, would prioritize “whole healthy and nutritious foods such as whole fat dairy,” and FDA Commissioner Marty Makary pledged to “end a 50-year war on natural saturated fat.”

This goes against the advice of many nutritionists, who say whole milk is high in saturated fat and that there’s no reason to push it in schools. It also goes against the advice of the 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines committee, which released a report in December saying there was no reason to recommend whole milk over low-fat milk. (The 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines will be released by the end of the year.)

In my latest story, I look into the growing debate over whole milk and whole fat dairy:

A Battle is Brewing Over Whole Milk

There was a time when people thought that drinking whole milk—and eating red meat—was healthy. At that time, people also had extremely high rates of heart disease. Since 1980, the dietary guidelines have recommended reducing saturated fat in Americans’ diets. That means, for adults, and kids over 5, drinking less whole milk.

But MAHA has other ideas. There’s a bill making its way through Congress, the Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act of 2025, that would overrule the current dietary guidelines to allow schools to offer whole milk. And the Trump administration has said the above comments about whole milk, also pledging to get whole milk back into schools in its recent MAHA Strategy report (which I wrote about here.)

I can’t tell if the push for whole milk is some kind of confusion that conflates whole milk with unprocessed foods (whole milk is just as processed as skim milk, so that doesn’t really make sense) or if it’s based on science. I talked to a bunch of nutritionists for this story, and a few said that there’s strong evidence that whole milk is not healthy, and one said that the science is changing and maybe whole milk isn’t that bad.

The thing that was most interesting to me, though, that came out of this reporting was when I talked to Jerold Mande, who was in the Obama administration and spearheaded the effort to replace the outdated food pyramid with a clearer graphic in 2011. They came up with something called MyPlate, which tells us to eat vegetables, fruit, whole grain, and protein. And then they have a little circle next to the plate that says “dairy.” This little blue circle, Mande says, was totally unnecessary—water is actually more important to the diet than milk—but the dairy industry was adamant that dairy be included.

Which made me wonder—is there really any reason to have dairy at all? Put aside for a moment the many struggles of dairy farmers, which I wrote about in 2019 and did an NPR Indicator episode about, why drink dairy? Two-thirds of the world is lactose intolerant and doesn’t drink dairy, and they are perfectly healthy. Milk has calcium, which is important, and is fortified with Vitamins A and D, but if you get those from other sources, there might not be a compelling reason to drink milk.

One reason we’re told to drink milk is so that we avoid bone fractures later in life, one doctor and researcher told me—but the countries with the lowest rates of later-in-life fractures are those with populations that are mostly lactose intolerant.

Here’s the milk story again: A Battle is Brewing Over Whole Milk

I also wrote about why it’s so hard to make school lunches better, after blanching at the menu for my kindergarten-aged son’s school. Why It’s So Hard To Make School Lunches Healthier, covered RFK Jr’s latest Congressional hearing, and explained why Obamacare prices are about to skyrocket.

As a follow-up to my story about women dropping out of the workforce, I also took a closer look at why so many childcare centers are struggling. I talked to a center that has run for 18 years in Wisconsin that is closing down and explored why others are closing: basically the end of federal and state subsidies from the pandemic. Interestingly, money spent on childcare often ends up back in the government’s coffers in the form of taxes from working parents, so there’s a good case for more spending government money. That probably isn’t going to happen in this political climate.

Why So Many Childcare Centers are Closing

Books to Fall Asleep To

I just finished listening to a random book called The China Mirage: The Hidden History of American Disaster in Asia by James Bradley that I highly recommend. It details how the U.S. in the early 20th century really, really wanted China to be governed by Chiang Kai-Shek, a general who was Mao’s rival, mostly because he was a devout Christian and many of his family members and associates went to school in the U.S. and had nice, approachable Southern accents. In the years leading up to World War II, the U.S. under Franklin Delano Roosevelt secretly supplied Chiang and the Chinese army with supplies and training from the U.S. army. Relevant too is that the Delano family, which generated much of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s fortune, made most of its money through the illegal opium trade in China. The book is basically about how the U.S. antagonized Mao and the Japanese by supporting Chiang and denying the Japanese oil for their attacks in China, and how many prominent U.S. leaders were wowed by Chiang Kai-Shek and the Chinese businessman and Methodist missionary Charlie Soong. Random suggestion from the library, but a winner!