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Bill to Allow Whole Milk in Schools Supported by Science, Experts Say

By Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D. | The Defender | July 25, 2023

For years, children at public schools have been offered only nonfat and 1% milk — but that may soon change, thanks to a bill that aims to put whole milk back on kids’ lunch trays.

The “Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act of 2023” would override the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) current guidelines on milk by amending the Richard B. Russell National School Lunch Act to allow school cafeterias to offer unflavored and flavored whole milk.

The U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and the Workforce on June 30 advanced the bill, which has been scheduled for a floor vote. The date of the vote is not yet publicly available.

According to the bill’s lead sponsor, Rep. Glenn “GT” Thompson (R-Pa.), “Bad federal policy has kept whole milk out of our school cafeterias for too long. … Milk is the number one source of 13 essential nutrients.”

The bill would bypass the USDA and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services advisory committee, which determine U.S. dietary guidelines — which in turn determines what foods schools can serve.

Whole milk banned in public schools since 2012

In what they said was an effort to curb childhood obesity, lawmakers passed the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, which revamped the National School Lunch Program to conform to the standing dietary guidelines recommending reduced saturated fat in children’s diets.

The National School Lunch Program provides low-cost or free lunches to roughly 30 million children in nearly 100,000 public and nonprofit private schools, as well as residential childcare institutions.

This led two years later to a ban of 2% and whole milk at participating schools.

Since then, schools have served non-fat and low-fat milk, including sweetened flavored varieties.

This experiment was “clearly a failure,” said Dr. Michelle Perro, “as rates of obesity continued to rise, now affecting 1 in 4 to 1 in 5 children.”

Perro, an integrative pediatrician with more than 38 years of experience, applauded Thompson’s “recognition that food policies can be revisited and changed,” telling The Defender:

“Fat is good for children. It is one of the three macronutrients the body needs for growth, nervous system health, hormone production, prostaglandins, etc. Additionally, fat in the diet helps with the absorbable and key vitamins A, D, E, and K, and are a concentrated energy source.”

The Nutrition Coalition, a nonprofit and nonpartisan group that “aims to improve health in America by ensuring that the public receives evidence-based nutritional advice,” last month sent a letter to Thompson in support of the legislation.

The group noted that whole milk was removed from schools in 2010 “due to longtime fears that saturated fats cause heart disease” — but “those fears are now outdated, as they are not supported by the current science.”

Health writer James Capon tweeted his support for the amendment:

Drinking less milk – particularly less whole milk, has not helped slow increasing rates of obesity and diabesity in the US.
Why still ban its consumption in US schools? Are things about to change? (graph from @bigfatsurprise). pic.twitter.com/Mjfky7LiwP

— Fat is our Friend (@fatisourfriend) July 12, 2023

‘We got it wrong on saturated fats’

According to the Nutrition Coalition, an “authoritative 2020 ‘State of the Art Review’” in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology found that there is “no robust evidence that current population-wide arbitrary upper limits on saturated fat consumption in the United States will prevent CVD [cardiovascular disease] or reduce Mortality.’”

“More than 20 other review papers by independent teams of scientists around the world have concluded the same,” the Nutrition Coalition added.

USDA’s 2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA) found that the evidence linking saturated fat to heart disease was “strong.” However, a 2021 peer-reviewed investigation by outside scientists showed 88% of the studies reviewed by the DGA committee did not support that conclusion.

The scientists noted that of the 39 studies the DGA committee reviewed, 25 had null or negative findings — meaning saturated fats were found either to have no effect on cardiovascular disease or coronary heart disease, or were associated with lower risk.

Additionally, the DGA committee looked at 11 studies on saturated fatty acids and stroke. Of those 11 studies, 8 had null findings and 3 reported higher intake of saturated fatty acids was associated with a lower risk of stroke, the scientists pointed out.

Despite those findings, the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), an independent consumer advocacy organization, on June 6 issued a statement against bringing whole milk back into schools, calling it “troublesome” that most U.S. children exceed the recommended limits on saturated fat and claiming that “too much saturated fat is linked to raises in LDL (‘bad’) cholesterol, a known cause of heart disease.”

Science journalist, author and founder of the Nutrition Coalition Nina Teicholz on June 12 pushed back against CSPI’s statement, noting that the committee for the current U.S. Dietary Guidelines found that there was “‘insufficient evidence’ to show that restricting saturated fats in childhood could prevent heart-disease or mortality in adulthood.”

Teicholz — who in her 2014 book, “The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet,” reviewed thousands of scientific studies and argued that the saturated fats in animal foods have been unfairly maligned based on weak, inconclusive evidence — said in a recent Substack post:

“Over the past 13 years, nearly 25 systematic reviews and meta-analyses, of both clinical trial and observational data, by independent teams of scientists have been published, and nearly all concluded that we got it wrong on saturated fats.

“The most rigorous clinical trial data show that these fats do not cause cardiovascular mortality or total mortality. Mortality (death) data is definitive. That should be the last word.”

Nonetheless, the USDA and the American Heart Association managed “simply to ignore these findings on mortality,” Teicholz said, “even when presented personally with these data by top scientists in the field … as reported in the BMJ.”

Meanwhile, the CSPI — which says it values “independence, scientific rigor, and transparency” — depicts the fight to get whole milk into schools as being led by “Big Dairy.”

But according to Teicholz, this claim lacks evidence:

“Interestingly, I’ve discovered that dairy behemoths like Danone make more money by skimming the fat off the milk and charging for it in other products, like ice cream, rather than selling the whole milk itself. These multinationals have shown themselves to be dis-interested in promoting whole milk.

“From what I can see, whole-milk advocacy seems mainly to be driven by people concerned about child health and farmers from the rapidly diminishing number of dairy farms in the U.S., 95% of which are family-owned.”

Teicholz questioned why CSPI would go to such lengths to keep whole milk out of schools. Part of the answer, she said, likely is that the group for decades has adamantly opposed saturated fats, so they are slow to acknowledge that current science no longer supports their stance:

“CSPI was so much against saturated fats that in the late 1980s, the group ran a major campaign in favor of replacing these harmful fats with trans fats, billed by the group’s newsletter as ‘healthy’ and ‘not a bad bargain’ for combatting heart disease (whoops! trans fats turned out to be even more of a heart-disease threat than saturated fats and were ultimately banned from the food supply).”

Studies ‘build the case for possible benefits’ of dairy fat

The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in November 2019 featured three peer-reviewed studies that called into question the narrative that the saturated fat in whole milk is harmful to people’s health.

The first study examined dairy fat consumption and the onset of diabetes in three cohorts of U.S. health professionals and found that higher dairy fat intake — when compared with calories from carbohydrates intake — was associated with lower diabetes risk in one cohort and not significantly associated with diabetes in the other two cohorts.

In an editorial about the study, Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, dean emeritus and distinguished professor at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University in Boston, wrote that the findings added to a “growing body of literature which call into question the soundness of conventional dietary recommendations to avoid dairy fat.”

The second study reported reductions in Type 2 diabetes were correlated with yogurt consumption and increases in cheese consumption, but could not form a conclusion on whole milk because few people in their study reported drinking it.

The third study looked at dairy consumption and death from cancer, cardiovascular disease and all causes in Italy.

The researchers found that compared with no milk consumption, moderate milk intake (≤200g or ∼6.5 ounces per day) was associated with around 25% lower mortality overall and 50% lower cardiovascular mortality. However, higher levels of milk consumption — either low-fat or whole milk — were not associated with lower mortality risk.

The three studies together, Mozaffarian said, provide “little support” for the notion that consuming dairy, or dairy fat, is “harmful,” but rather, “They continue to build the case for possible benefits.”

Americans more obese, unhealthy after push for low-fat diets

According to pediatrician Dr. Lawrence Palevsky, “Low-fat diets have been pushed by the health, medical and food industries for many decades.”

He said:

“Fat was demonized as a health hazard, and, as low-fat or non-fat items were pushed into American society, Americans became more overweight, obese and unhealthy. Why?

“Polyunsaturated fats (more inflammatory omega-6 seed, vegetable, corn and soybean oils than healthy anti-inflammatory omega-3 oils) were substituted for saturated fats, and processed bleached white sugars and high fructose corn syrup sugars were added to low-fat and non-fat foods to make them more palatable.

“These changes, all in what we were told were in the best interests of our health, only made Americans sicker and more overweight.”

Perro, too, believes the attack on fat and promotion of carbs stems from industry advocacy. The USDA food pyramid — originally designed by former USDA Director of Dietary Guidance and Nutrition Education Research Luise Light — was “hijacked and thwarted by the wheat and corn industries,” according to Perro.

Palevsky said he is not afraid of saturated fats in the diet. “What I do fear is the consumption of saturated fats from animal sources that are poorly fed with inappropriate and toxic diets, and those animals that are abused and poorly cared for in concentrated animal feed operations.”

These inappropriate diets and toxic exposures and living conditions, he said, make consuming the fat of the animals unhealthy:

“Most people are unaware that toxins are stored in animal fat tissue and that is what makes the saturated fats unhealthy for us when we consume milks and products from these animals.

“When animals are grass-fed and pasture-raised, and allowed to live in the wild, and we choose to cook them in a way that doesn’t destroy the quality of the fat, these saturated fats will generally not harm us. In fact, we may gain many benefits from consuming them.”

Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D., is a reporter and researcher for The Defender based in Fairfield, Iowa. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Texas at Austin (2021), and a master’s degree in communication and leadership from Gonzaga University (2015). Her scholarship has been published in Health Communication. She has taught at various academic institutions in the United States and is fluent in Spanish.

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

July 30, 2023 Posted by aletho | Science and Pseudo-Science | United States | Leave a comment