Milk is mundane in most contexts, but you can’t help noticing when it is smeared across the upper lips of America’s government officials. An image of Donald Trump sporting a milk mustache and glowering over a glass of milk was just one of many dairy-themed posts shared by government accounts on X during the past week, all of which made clear that the milk was whole. In one video, a seemingly AI-generated Robert F. Kennedy Jr. takes a sip and is transported to a nightclub, suddenly milk-mustachioed; in another, former Housing Secretary Ben Carson raises a glass of full-fat and sports a white ’stache. The upper lips of the former collegiate swimmer Riley Gaines and the former NBA player Enes Kantor Freedom, among other personalities embraced by the right, also got the whole-milk treatment.
The posts were shared to celebrate a big month for whole milk. On January 7, the Department of Agriculture released its updated Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which newly recommend whole dairy over low-fat products, and placed a carton of whole milk near the top of a revamped, upside-down food pyramid. Then, on Wednesday, President Trump signed into law a bill allowing schools to serve whole milk after more than a decade of being restricted to low-fat.
Medical professionals, who have long advised people to avoid full-fat dairy because it contains high levels of saturated fat, were generally critical of the new dietary guidelines for milk. But Kennedy and Trump, along with other government officials, have framed it as a major win for health. Kennedy recently argued that America’s children have been missing out on key nutrients such as calcium and vitamin D because they don’t want to drink the low-fat milk served in schools. The new law, he said at its signing, embodies the new dietary guidelines’ directive to “eat real food.”
The low-fat-versus-whole controversy is a real, active scientific debate. For roughly the past two decades, reduced-fat milk (2 percent milk fat, by weight) has dominated American refrigerators largely thanks to fears about fat in general, and saturated fat in particular. Copious research has linked saturated-fat intake with health issues including cardiovascular disease and cancer, as well as death from all causes. It also leads to higher LDL (“bad”) cholesterol, which has been shown to cause strokes and heart attacks, Kyla Lara-Breitinger, a cardiologist at the Mayo Clinic, told me.
Saturated fat generally isn’t a huge concern for children, so giving them the option to drink whole milk at school is somewhat less fraught, Steven Abrams, a child-nutrition expert and a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics, told me. And some researchers propose that, because whole milk is more satiating, kids who drink it are less likely to reach for other high-calorie foods. “Full-fat dairy is especially important for kids ages 12 months to 10 years to meet energy needs and promote brain development,” a spokesperson for the Department of Agriculture wrote in an email. But the AAP holds that kids should switch to drinking low-fat or skim at age 2.
In contrast to most nutritionists, Kennedy is all in on saturated fat, championing foods such as butter, beef tallow, and red meat. At a press conference to announce the new dietary guidelines, Kennedy proclaimed that the government was “ending the war on saturated fats.” The reality is more confusing. The new dietary guidelines promote more foods that are high in saturated fat, but they retain the old recommendation to limit daily saturated-fat intake to 10 percent of total calories, or about 20 grams a day in a 2,000-calorie diet. A single cup of whole milk has 5 grams. If a person consumes the recommended three daily servings of full-fat dairy, it would be “pretty close to impossible” to stay within the saturated fat limit, Caitlin Dow, a senior nutrition scientist at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, told me. (The White House and the Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to a request for comment.)
A relatively new and controversial school of thought posits that full-fat milk isn’t as harmful as other sources of saturated fat. A 2018 study that involved participants from 21 countries found that dairy consumption—even whole-fat dairy—was negatively correlated with mortality and major cardiovascular-disease events. Other studies have shown that the consumption of whole-fat dairy is linked to decreased diabetes risk and doesn’t cause weight gain. “There’s no convincing evidence that low-fat dairy is preferable to whole-fat dairy for any health outcome,” Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist at Tufts University who was a co-author on the 2018 study, told me. The broader research community has so far resisted this idea, but has acknowledged that the science on dairy fat has become more complex. “The reason you’re getting so many conflicting opinions is that the evidence is very controversial,” Lara-Breitinger said, noting the lack of randomized clinical trials comparing whole-fat and low-fat dairy.
Ultimately, milk isn’t “going to make or break a diet,” Dow said. Dairy makes up just 10 percent of the average American’s caloric intake, and most of that is cheese. Even for kids, very real concerns, such as obesity and diabetes, will probably not be solved—or meaningfully exacerbated—by a switch to whole milk. “You could probably have either low-fat or whole-fat, and it doesn’t matter,” Mozaffarian said.
As I have written previously, Americans have spent roughly the past 150 years quarreling about various aspects of milk, including its benefits, safety, and chemical composition. That’s partly because dairy is a powerful industry; last year, dairy products in the U.S. had an economic impact of nearly $780 billion. But since 2012, when the USDA under then-President Barack Obama required schools to serve only low-fat milk, student milk consumption has declined; according to the dairy industry, that’s because low-fat milk doesn’t taste as good. The Trump administration’s promotion of whole milk, Dow said, “really, really supports the dairy industry’s bottom line.” In fact, many of the reviewers of the new dietary guidelines were recently found to have ties to the beef and dairy industries. (When I asked the USDA about allegations of industry influence on the push for whole milk, the spokesperson asserted that the evidence “was evaluated based solely on scientific rigor, study design, consistency of findings, and biological plausibility.”)
Beyond serving as an economic engine, milk is a potent cultural symbol. It has long evoked an idealized past: a simpler time when cows roamed through pastures and produced pure, wholesome milk, and the Americans who tended them thrived in harmony with the natural world. Dairy companies have leaned into that aesthetic, featuring barns, fields, and words such as pure on milk cartons. Milk is also culturally linked to strength, wealth, and beauty, thanks in no small part to the celebrity-studded dairy ads of the late 20th century, including the “Got Milk?” campaign referenced by the Trump administration’s milk mustaches. Such positive associations make milk a powerful metaphor for what America could be—if certain unsavory elements of modernity could be undone or erased.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this association has also been invoked in racist contexts for more than a century. In a 1923 speech, Herbert Hoover, who was then commerce secretary and would be elected president five years later, framed milk as a means to ensure “the very growth and virility of the white races.” Modern-day white nationalists and alt-right groups hold up dairy milk as a symbol of whiteness and masculinity, in contrast to soy milk, which they associate with the woke, feminist, multiracial left. (Yes, seriously.)
The idealized era of perfectly safe, perfectly wholesome dairy never really existed. “This whole idea that there was a time when we were healthy, and during that time we were eating steak and drinking whole milk, is not rooted in any reality,” Dow said. Nevertheless, it resonates with the MAHA and MAGA agendas, which both center on the belief that America will return to its former glory if it can re-create the past. The Trump administration’s endorsement of whole milk may nominally be about public health. But a recent White House post featuring a retro illustration of the president as an old-fashioned milkman, captioned “Make Whole Milk Great Again,” was all about aspiration—and the purified nation, untainted by modernity, that America could someday become.
Yasmin Tayag
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