In December, a scientific committee concluded two years of intensive research on what Americans should be eating by saying that there was not enough research to recommend people drink any other type of milk than fat-free (skim) or low-fat (1% or 2%). Whole milk contains high amounts of saturated fat, and research has found that saturated fat raises cholesterol and is linked to an increased risk of cardiovascular problems.
But the Trump Administration—and some scientists—disagree with this assessment. In its Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Strategy Report released Sept. 9, the administration says it wants to “remove restrictions on whole milk sales in schools,” which would allow districts to offer full-fat dairy options, and that the departments will “eliminate mandatory reduced-fat requirements in federal nutrition programs to allow consumer choice.”
In a press conference on Sept. 9, administration officials doubled down on their embrace of whole milk and full-fat dairy. Brooke Rollins, secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, made it clear that the administration plans to overrule that December assessment of the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee—made up of dozens of experts nominated by the public and industry stakeholders who rigorously review existing science and come up with new dietary guidelines every five years—when it comes to milk, saying that it would be “completely resetting and reworking” the guidelines. “These guidelines will prioritize whole healthy and nutritious foods such as whole-fat dairy,” Rollins said.
Dr. Martin Makary, commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, said at the press conference that the administration would embrace not only whole-fat dairy products, but also saturated fat. “We’re ending the 50-year war on natural saturated fat,” he said, adding that he thinks the ban on whole milk in schools “makes no sense” and that it’s “nutrition guidance by the government based not on evidence, but on dogma.”
Scientists reacted immediately. On Sept. 10, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine asked the MAHA Commission to modify its new action plan “so as not to put children’s cardiovascular health at risk with full-fat milk in schools.” The physicians said they agreed with MAHA that poor diet can lead to childhood chronic disease, but emphasized that early signs of heart disease and high cholesterol are showing up in children with increasing frequency.
“The federal government should be putting less saturated fat on school lunch trays, not more, and it can do that by making it easier for students to access non-dairy beverages and plant-based entrees,” said the group’s president Dr. Neal Barnard in a statement.
The opposing viewpoints on whole milk illuminate a growing debate in nutrition science.
The debate over saturated fat in whole milk
Many nutrition experts say that the administration’s support of whole milk bucks decades of scientific consensus. The first edition of the Dietary Guidelines of America, in 1980, told people to avoid too much saturated fat since it can contribute to heart disease, and subsequent editions have maintained that recommendation.
“The real question is: is there any reason to be pushing high-fat dairy? And no, I don’t think we have a case that’s a good thing to do,” says Dr. Walter Willett, a professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
While consuming whole milk instead of skim milk might not make a huge difference in someone’s health if they drink just one serving of milk a day, three servings of whole milk a day—what a child might have at school, for instance—would include too much saturated fat, Willett says. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, when Americans were drinking more whole milk and eating more red meat, rates of heart disease were four to five times higher than they are today.
“The Dietary Guidelines Committee is very cautious about going backwards, because it wasn’t better in the 1950s and 1960s, despite the MAHA idea that everything was good back then,” he says.
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Low-fat milk has its downsides, too. Some people who consume low-fat milk may unconsciously replace the calories they would be getting from whole milk with calories from somewhere else, such as ultraprocessed foods or foods high in sugar or fat, Willett says. And some brands of low-fat milk replace the fat in whole milk with sugars and added flavors to entice kids to drink it. Scientists may recommend drinking whole milk because they think it’s a better option than those alternatives, Willett says. But replacing those calories with greens or nuts or whole grains would be a better dietary choice than drinking whole milk, he says.
Willett believes that soy milk might be a good alternative; it generally has a comparable amount of calcium, protein, and Vitamins A and D as dairy milk, and there is evidence that it reduces cholesterol and can lead to a lower risk of breast cancer later in life. Plant-based milks are also better for the climate and better tolerated by those who are lactose intolerant, says Jerold Mande, an adjunct professor of nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a senior policy official for nutrition in the Bush, Clinton, and Obama administrations.
The ban on whole milk in schools comes from the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, which required schools to offer only fat-free or low-fat milk in an effort to align with the dietary guidelines. There’s not a lot of new evidence to alter that law or that recommendation, says Grace Chamberlin, a policy associate at the Center for Science in the Public Interest.
“The recommendation is based on the science that whole milk and low-fat milk have exactly the same quantities of protein, calcium, and all the good stuff, but whole milk has a lot more saturated fat, so it’s just not worth the risk,” Chamberlin says. “If there’s all of this science that saturated fat increases your risk of cardiovascular disease, and you can get all of the same positive nutrients from low fat and skim milk and less saturated fat, why drink whole milk?”
In defense of whole milk
Some experts strongly disagree with this assessment. Where saturated fat comes from matters, and while Willett says that dairy fat is not a healthy fat, others maintain that it is. Further complicating matters is that some studies have not found a robust link between reducing dietary saturated fat and having fewer cardiovascular events.
Even the most recent Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee found scant evidence that low-fat dairy was healthier than whole-fat dairy, says Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist and the director of the Food is Medicine Institute at Tufts University, who was not part of the committee.
The committee concluded that since it couldn’t prove there was no harm from whole-fat dairy, it would not change its recommendation. “Substituting higher-fat dairy with lower-fat dairy by adults and older adults is not associated with a difference in risk of cardiovascular disease morbidity,” read the committee’s December 2024 report. “This conclusion statement is based on evidence graded as limited.”
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Saturated fat does have other issues, Mozaffarian says: olive oil is nutritionally superior to butter because it’s lower in saturated fat, for instance, and it would be better to switch from whole milk to low-fat milk if you replace those extra calories with healthy whole foods. But many people replace those extra calories with carbohydrates instead, which is not an improvement over whole milk, he says.
“Saturated fat is kind of background. It’s not the best thing in the diet, it’s not the worst thing in the diet,” he says. “But it doesn’t deserve devil’s horns.”
Mozaffarian is not the only nutrition scientist with this perspective. One study of adults in France found that full-fat dairy consumption was not associated with heart-disease or stroke risk, and that fermented full-fat cheese and yogurt actually led to a reduced risk of stroke. Another study suggested that overall consumption of milk, yogurt, and cheese—no matter the fat content—has no impact on risk of cardiovascular disease.
Roger Marshall, an ob-gyn who is also a Republican Senator from Kansas, supports whole milk in schools because, he says, it includes more fat-soluble vitamins that help absorb vitamins A, D, E, and K compared to skim milk.
MAHA is “about whole foods,” said Marshall in an April Senate Committee hearing about a bill, called the Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act of 2025, that would overrule the current dietary guidelines to allow schools to offer whole milk. “And I think we could characterize whole milk as part of that MAHA movement as well.”
Saturated fat vs. unsaturated fat
Some scientists are concerned that the MAHA movement is conflating fat and saturated fat. For a long time, dietary guidelines recommended that people reduce their fat intake, a suggestion that turned out to be too broad and misguided.
Not all fat is bad, most scientists now agree. But many stand by the idea that saturated fat is not healthy, and were baffled by Makary’s pledge to end the “war” on saturated fats. They include Mande, the professor and former senior policy official. “He conflates the whole-fat debate and the saturated fat debate,” Mande says. “The saturated fat evidence is strong and has remained strong.”
There is also clear evidence, Willett says, that replacing saturated fat with polyunsaturated fat or plant oils or whole grains will reduce the risk of heart disease and death. Telling people that consuming more full-fat dairy or red meat has no adverse health effects is misleading, he adds.
“This looks like a re-run of the CDC vaccine committee scenario, which is causing massive confusion and undermining the health of Americans,” he said in an email.
The influence of the dairy industry
The debate over whole milk is not just about science. The dairy industry has a strong lobbying arm that is pushing for whole milk to be welcomed once again. “MAHA may help create promising opportunities for dairy,” wrote Gregg Doud, CEO of the National Milk Producers Federation, on the group’s website. Milk producers have struggled in recent years; as technology has made milk production more efficient, Americans are drinking less of it.
“The dairy industry has been bent on this idea that if we could just get more high-fat milk out there, more people would be drinking and enjoying it,” says Mande, the former senior policy official for nutrition.
The industry is so powerful, Mande says, that when he was leading the charge to replace the decades-old food pyramid during the Obama Administration, the dairy industry successfully pushed for a prime spot in the new graphic. The tool, called MyPlate, has spots for fruits, vegetables, grains, and protein, and then a blue circle next to it with the word “dairy.”
“If you look at the MyPlate logo, there’s milk right there, even though there’s no explanation for it in the science, and that’s just because of the dairy industry,” he says. “They really wanted to see that good nutrition requires milk every day.” A better reflection of the science, he says, would be to picture a glass of water.
Alan Bjerga, a spokesman from the National Milk Producers Association, said in a statement to TIME that dairy “has long been recognized for its critical contributions to diet, regardless of which party holds sway in the federal government.” The December scientific report from the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee maintained the number of recommended dairy servings found in the 2020 guidelines—2 to 3 cups a day for people age two and over, he said—and also kept dairy as a separate group.
Still, some research suggests that milk, specifically, isn’t necessary for a healthy adult diet. It provides a good amount of calcium and is fortified with Vitamins A and D, but you can get all of those things from eating other types of dairy and other healthy foods, says Willett, one of the authors of the research. There’s evidence that people can be healthy without milk; two-thirds of the world has trouble digesting lactose, after all.
One of the main justifications for drinking milk is that it prevents bone fractures later in life, says Willett. But his own research found that the countries with the lowest fracture rates are actually those that consume the least milk.
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