Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced earlier this week that he wants to expand dairy recommendations in the federal dietary guidelines, which are set to be updated later this year.
“I grew up in a world where milk was the healthiest thing that you could eat,” Kennedy said during a news conference on Monday. “There’s a tremendous amount of emerging science that talks about the need for more protein in our diet and more fats in our diet. And there’s no industry that does that better than this industry.”
Currently, the U.S. dietary guidelines recommend Americans ages 9 and older have three cup equivalents of dairy daily or lactose-free or fortified soy alternatives. and children ages 1 to 8 are recommended to have between 1.6 cups and 2.5 cups depending on their age.
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This includes dairy milk, fortified soy milk, yogurt with added calcium, vitamin A, and vitamin D and a range of cheeses such as hard cheese, processed cheese, ricotta cheese, cottage cheese, queso fresco and queso blanco.
Nutrition experts told ABC News that dairy is considered part of a healthy dietary pattern — and there are no known harms from consuming dairy — but Americans may want to consume dairy-free alternatives for personal reasons and should consider a variety of dairy products for maximum health benefits.
Benefits of dairy
Dairy contains many nutrients, including calcium, magnesium, potassium, protein and vitamins A and D, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).
These nutrients help build healthy bones and teeth as well as support immune health. Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, director of Tufts University’s Food is Medicine Institute, told ABC News there may be other benefits.
“Dairy, in both randomized trials and long-term observational studies, lowers blood pressure. It improves lean body mass and lowers fat mass and, in observational studies, people who consume more dairy have a lower risk of stroke, which is consistent with this blood pressure-lowering effect,” Mozaffarian said.
He said the three daily recommended servings were originally set due to the calcium and vitamin D that dairy products contain.
However, he added that people can get those nutrients from other products, including leafy greens for calcium and fatty fish for vitamin D.
“I think the evidence for the stroke and diabetes and blood pressure are as important, if not more important,” Mozaffarian said. “If you want these other benefits, those seem to be dairy and. in particular, yogurt and cheese for diabetes and milk for blood pressure and stroke.”
Are they any drawbacks?
Andrea Deierlein, an associate professor of public health nutrition at NYU School of Global Public Health, said there are many reasons Americans may not choose to consume dairy, including lactose intolerance, allergies to dairy milk and cultural practices.
“I think that if people don’t consume dairy for personal reasons or cultural reasons, or it’s just having allergies or intolerances, I don’t think there’s a concern about not consuming dairy because … obviously there’s lactose-free varieties as well as soy varieties,” she told ABC News.
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There is some contention around how much of a risk saturated fat is when it comes to dairy products. Currently, the dietary guidelines recommend Americans consume lower fat or fat-free dairy products when possible.
Saturated fat can increase levels of “bad” cholesterol and increase the risk of heart disease, according to the American Heart Association.
“There’s a known association between consuming saturated fat and cardiovascular markers and cardiovascular disease risk,” Deierlein said.
However, she noted that in the 2025 Scientific Report — an independent report written by the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee that helps the HHS and USDA develop the next set of dietary guidelines — it found that saturated fat from meat may be less healthy that saturated fat from dairy.
The report found that adults substituting processed meat and red meat with dairy was associated with a lower risk of cardiovascular disease morbidity, but more research is needed.
“The Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee … one of their questions, they specifically asked is: Are there any health benefits from replacing whole fat dairy with reduced fat dairy? And they looked at blood cholesterol, blood pressure, heart attacks, strokes and cardiovascular mortality and diabetes, and they found no evidence for any benefits whatsoever switching from whole fat dairy to low-fat dairy,” Mozaffarian said.
Mozaffarian said in the upcoming guidelines, he would like to still see three daily recommended servings but that at least two of the servings be fermented, either yogurt or cheese, rather than three servings of milk.
“I think Americans should have yogurt every day because it’s a fermented food that has active probiotics and seems to improve the gut microbiome,” he said. “Yogurt is consistently linked to low risk of diabetes, and then also cheese is linked to low risk of diabetes.”
He continued, “So I think having a mix of dairy is important because these are different foods and ensuring that we’re getting the health benefits from the mix of foods” is important.
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