Milk & School Lunch Guidelines

And what about the school lunch guidelines? Do you think those need to be changed too? Well, you know, they get it wrong in two ways. First of all, as you said, that they have this obligatory drop of the milk carton on the plate for the meal to be reimbursed. And it also has to be reduced fat. So whereas it's perfectly acceptable to serve sugary fat-free milk, you can't serve. You're prohibited from serving unsweetened plain whole milk. Now, what's the sense of that? Well, I guess if you're thinking in a simplistic way of calories in, calories out, you're giving kids fewer calories, fewer fat calories, and maybe that's a good thing. Unfortunately, the clinical trials that we have in the epidemiology that we have suggest the opposite, that the kids who are drinking whole milk tend to gain less weight than the kids who are drinking non-fat milk. And that's even after taking into account something, a concept called reverse causality. Like you might think that people are drinking non-fat milk because they're gaining too much weight. Maybe these are the heavier kids and they switched to non-fat milk. But there's ways of taking that into account and research. And even with that, Whole milk, if anything, looks better than fat-free milk.