Milk is mundane in most contexts, however you possibly can’t assist noticing when it’s smeared throughout the higher lips of America’s authorities officers. A picture of Donald Trump sporting a milk mustache and glowering over a glass of milk was simply certainly one of many dairy-themed posts shared by authorities accounts on X in the course of the previous week, all of which made clear that the milk was complete. In a single video, a seemingly AI-generated Robert F. Kennedy Jr. takes a sip and is transported to a nightclub, instantly milk-mustachioed; in one other, former Housing Secretary Ben Carson raises a glass of full-fat and sports activities a white ’stache. The higher lips of the previous collegiate swimmer Riley Gaines and the previous NBA participant Enes Kantor Freedom, amongst different personalities embraced by the appropriate, additionally bought the whole-milk therapy.
The posts had been shared to rejoice a giant month for complete milk. On January 7, the Division of Agriculture launched its up to date Dietary Tips for People, which newly suggest complete dairy over low-fat merchandise, and positioned a carton of complete milk close to the highest of a revamped, upside-down meals pyramid. Then, on Wednesday, President Trump signed into legislation a invoice permitting faculties to serve complete milk after greater than a decade of being restricted to low-fat.
Medical professionals, who’ve lengthy suggested individuals to keep away from full-fat dairy as a result of it comprises excessive ranges of saturated fats, had been usually important of the brand new dietary pointers for milk. However Kennedy and Trump, together with different authorities officers, have framed it as a serious win for well being. Kennedy not too long ago argued that America’s youngsters have been lacking out on key vitamins similar to calcium and vitamin D as a result of they don’t need to drink the low-fat milk served in faculties. The brand new legislation, he mentioned at its signing, embodies the brand new dietary pointers’ directive to “eat actual meals.”
The low-fat-versus-whole controversy is an actual, energetic scientific debate. For roughly the previous 20 years, reduced-fat milk (2 p.c milk fats, by weight) has dominated American fridges largely due to fears about fats basically, and saturated fats specifically. Copious analysis has linked saturated-fat consumption with well being points together with heart problems and most cancers, in addition to demise from all causes. It additionally results in greater LDL (“unhealthy”) ldl cholesterol, which has been proven to trigger strokes and coronary heart assaults, Kyla Lara-Breitinger, a heart specialist on the Mayo Clinic, informed me.
Saturated fats usually isn’t an enormous concern for kids, so giving them the choice to drink complete milk in school is considerably much less fraught, Steven Abrams, a child-nutrition knowledgeable and a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics, informed me. And a few researchers suggest that, as a result of complete milk is extra satiating, youngsters who drink it are much less prone to attain for different high-calorie meals. “Full-fat dairy is particularly essential for teenagers ages 12 months to 10 years to satisfy vitality wants and promote mind growth,” a spokesperson for the Division of Agriculture wrote in an e mail. However the AAP holds that youngsters ought to swap to ingesting low-fat or skim at age 2.
In distinction to most nutritionists, Kennedy is all in on saturated fats, championing meals similar to butter, beef tallow, and pink meat. At a press convention to announce the brand new dietary pointers, Kennedy proclaimed that the federal government was “ending the battle on saturated fat.” The fact is extra complicated. The brand new dietary pointers promote extra meals which might be excessive in saturated fats, however they preserve the previous advice to restrict day by day saturated-fat consumption to 10 p.c of complete energy, or about 20 grams a day in a 2,000-calorie eating regimen. A single cup of complete milk has 5 grams. If an individual consumes the really helpful three day by day servings of full-fat dairy, it might be “fairly near inconceivable” to remain throughout the saturated fats restrict, Caitlin Dow, a senior vitamin scientist on the Middle for Science within the Public Curiosity, informed me. (The White Home and the Division of Well being and Human Companies didn’t reply to a request for remark.)
A comparatively new and controversial faculty of thought posits that full-fat milk isn’t as dangerous as different sources of saturated fats. A 2018 examine that concerned members from 21 international locations discovered that dairy consumption—even whole-fat dairy—was negatively correlated with mortality and main cardiovascular-disease occasions. Different research have proven that the consumption of whole-fat dairy is linked to decreased diabetes threat and doesn’t trigger weight acquire. “There’s no convincing proof that low-fat dairy is preferable to whole-fat dairy for any well being consequence,” Dariush Mozaffarian, a heart specialist at Tufts College who was a co-author on the 2018 examine, informed me. The broader analysis neighborhood has to date resisted this concept, however has acknowledged that the science on dairy fats has grow to be extra advanced. “The explanation you’re getting so many conflicting opinions is that the proof may be very controversial,” Lara-Breitinger mentioned, noting the shortage of randomized medical trials evaluating whole-fat and low-fat dairy.
In the end, milk isn’t “going to make or break a eating regimen,” Dow mentioned. Dairy makes up simply 10 p.c of the typical American’s caloric consumption, and most of that’s cheese. Even for teenagers, very actual considerations, similar to weight problems and diabetes, will in all probability not be solved—or meaningfully exacerbated—by a swap to complete milk. “You possibly can in all probability have both low-fat or whole-fat, and it doesn’t matter,” Mozaffarian mentioned.
As I’ve written beforehand, People have spent roughly the previous 150 years quarreling about numerous elements of milk, together with its advantages, security, and chemical composition. That’s partly as a result of dairy is a strong business; final 12 months, dairy merchandise within the U.S. had an financial impression of almost $780 billion. However since 2012, when the USDA beneath then-President Barack Obama required faculties to serve solely low-fat milk, scholar milk consumption has declined; in line with the dairy business, that’s as a result of low-fat milk doesn’t style nearly as good. The Trump administration’s promotion of complete milk, Dow mentioned, “actually, actually helps the dairy business’s backside line.” In truth, most of the reviewers of the brand new dietary pointers had been not too long ago discovered to have ties to the meat and dairy industries. (After I requested the USDA about allegations of business affect on the push for complete milk, the spokesperson asserted that the proof “was evaluated based mostly solely on scientific rigor, examine design, consistency of findings, and organic plausibility.”)
Past serving as an financial engine, milk is a potent cultural image. It has lengthy evoked an idealized previous: an easier time when cows roamed by way of pastures and produced pure, healthful milk, and the People who tended them thrived in concord with the pure world. Dairy firms have leaned into that aesthetic, that includes barns, fields, and phrases similar to pure on milk cartons. Milk can also be culturally linked to power, wealth, and sweetness, thanks in no small half to the celebrity-studded dairy advertisements of the late twentieth century, together with the “Acquired Milk?” marketing campaign referenced by the Trump administration’s milk mustaches. Such optimistic associations make milk a strong metaphor for what America may very well be—if sure unsavory parts of modernity may very well be undone or erased.
Maybe unsurprisingly, this affiliation has additionally been invoked in racist contexts for greater than a century. In a 1923 speech, Herbert Hoover, who was then commerce secretary and could be elected president 5 years later, framed milk as a method to make sure “the very development and virility of the white races.” Fashionable-day white nationalists and alt-right teams maintain up dairy milk as a logo of whiteness and masculinity, in distinction to soy milk, which they affiliate with the woke, feminist, multiracial left. (Sure, critically.)
The idealized period of completely secure, completely healthful dairy by no means actually existed. “This complete concept that there was a time once we had been wholesome, and through that point we had been consuming steak and ingesting complete milk, just isn’t rooted in any actuality,” Dow mentioned. Nonetheless, it resonates with the MAHA and MAGA agendas, which each middle on the idea that America will return to its former glory if it might probably re-create the previous. The Trump administration’s endorsement of complete milk might nominally be about public well being. However a latest White Home put up that includes a retro illustration of the president as an old school milkman, captioned “Make Entire Milk Nice Once more,” was all about aspiration—and the purified nation, untainted by modernity, that America may sometime grow to be.