RFK Jr. Said Not Giving Kids Whole Milk In Public School Is “Almost Child Abuse”
His comment suggests the federal government is still heavily focused on promoting dairy.
June marks the beginning of Dairy Month in the state of Wisconsin, home to the most dairy farms of any state, a fact Americans nationwide are now aware of as a result of remarks made by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. during a visit to the Gilbertson family farm in Elk Mound, Wisconsin on Monday, June 1. When asked by a reporter what programs or policies the federal government is working on to support America’s dairy farmers, Kennedy responded that one large step had already been taken.
“Probably the biggest thing we did is flip the food pyramid and put dairy at the top,” he said, referring to the updated dietary guidelines his agency published in January of this year, emphasizing the need for more protein, dairy, and “healthy fats” in Americans’ diets. What he said next caused the interview to go viral.
“We’ve deprived two generations of children of whole milk, which has all the micronutrients that they need for brain growth, for physical development, for bone development. It really was almost a form of child abuse to do that,” he said. “President Trump, because of his leadership, is bringing whole milk back to American schools, but also just good food and real food. Food that comes from farms, not from chemical plants.”
So, where did that come from?
Just days after unveiling the new U.S. dietary guidelines in January, President Donald Trump signed into effect the Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act, allowing schools to offer whole milk and reduced-fat milk for the first time since the Obama-era Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act in 2012 removed them from public school cafeterias. (These are the “two generations of children” RFK Jr. cited in the interview.) The bill also included verbiage supporting the inclusion of nutritionally comparable non-dairy alternatives, like soy milk.
Despite Kennedy’s statement about bringing healthier food to schools nationwide, the Trump administration has taken a sizable toll on schools’ ability to feed students at all. The President’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act cut funding to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), thereby ending automatic free meal eligibility of children, Forbes reports — “Fewer children qualifying for SNAP lowers a school’s identified student percentage of those requiring assistance, meaning fewer reimbursements may be offered to schools providing free or reduced-cost meals.”
In 2025, the USDA’s $660 million Local Food For Schools program, which helped schools buy produce from local farms, was canceled. Like grocery prices in general, the cost of food for schools has risen too, and complying with HHS’ new dietary guidelines makes the cost of ingredients much higher.
The whole thing is “weird,” said Erica Kenney, associate professor of public health nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, in a 2025 interview with STAT about the then-forthcoming legislation. The reintroduction of higher-fat milks seemed to her to be part of the MAHA movement’s agenda to rehab the image of saturated fat, something she and other health experts do not support.
“What’s alarming to me isn’t the milk necessarily,” she told STAT, but the stance of the federal government that “we don’t need to worry so much about saturated fat content anymore. I’m a little alarmed about what might be coming next.”
Dairy products contain saturated animal fats. The American Heart Association maintains that the only healthy fats are those of the unsaturated variety; this is because saturated fats raise cholesterol levels and increase the risk of cardiovascular disease, a scientific consensus based on decades of research.
As Scary Mommy previously reported, there have been a handful of studies in recent years calling the relationship between saturated fat and heart disease into question, but nutrition experts told us they are not enough to change our current understanding of the risks of consuming too much of the stuff. Kennedy has a history of citing small and insufficient studies when making policy changes, specifically when it comes to vaccine recommendations and fluoridating water.
Instead, the experts felt like Kennedy might be using whole milk as a temporary stand-in for what he really wants to see in more federally funded food programs: raw milk. Since taking office as HHS secretary, Kennedy has decried ultra-processed foods and cited them as a contributing factor to America’s high rates of obesity and chronic illness, and is also a long-time promoter of drinking unpasteurized dairy.
“Whole milk is not less processed. When milk arrives at the factory, the fat is separated and then it is re-added at a specific percentage. Whole milk is 3.25%,” said Dr. Kéra Nyemb-Diop, a nutrition scientist with special expertise in dairy science, told Scary Mommy back in January. “I know there’s a whole debate around ultra-processed food, processing, and kind of the underlying ideology of the new administration. My belief as a scientist is that RFK Jr. wanted to say raw milk. He said whole milk because it’s closer to what’s perceived as less processed.”
