Whole milk is officially back as an option in America’s school nutrition programs, signaling a MAHA-style shift away from outdated low-fat dogma and back toward real, nutrient-dense food for children.

On May 8, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced that USDA has issued the final rule implementing the Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act, restoring whole and 2% milk options in federal Child Nutrition Programs for children and adults ages 2 and older.

“President Trump promised to Make America Healthy Again, and restoring whole milk to schools is a major step toward delivering on that promise,” Rollins said.

She continued, “For years, outdated federal rules kept nutritious whole milk off school menus, despite growing evidence showing the importance of healthy fats and nutrient-dense foods for child development. USDA is proud to implement the Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act and give schools the flexibility to serve real, wholesome milk options that help children grow, learn, and thrive.”

President Trump signed the act into law on January 14, 2026. Now, USDA’s final rule puts that policy into practice across school and child nutrition programs nationwide.

The rule does not require every school to carry whole milk. Instead, it allows schools and child nutrition providers to offer whole and 2% milk again as part of federal Child Nutrition Programs.

“This bipartisan solution to school meals alongside the newly released Dietary Guidelines for Americans reinforces what families already know: nutrient dense foods like whole milk are an important part of a healthy diet,” said Rollins.

A New Direction for School Nutrition

For decades, federal school lunch rules limited children to low-fat milk options, based on outdated research and medical dogma that treated dairy fat as a threat. At the same time, school cafeterias continued serving refined grains, added sugars, seed oils, and ultra-processed foods — the same dietary offerings that have fueled America’s childhood chronic disease crisis.

The whole milk rule begins to correct that imbalance. It is also one of the first practical signs of a broader nutrition reset taking shape under HHS Secretary Kennedy and Rollins. Earlier this year, the administration released the 2025–2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which reintroduced full-fat dairy as part of a healthy diet. Now, with USDA’s final rule, that shift will begin to reach children in the school cafeteria.

Why This Matters for Children

Children are growing, learning, moving, and developing at a rapid pace. Their brains, bones, muscles, hormones, and immune systems all require real nourishment, including protein, minerals, fat-soluble vitamins, and healthy fats.

Whole milk dairy products provide protein, calcium, potassium, phosphorus, riboflavin, niacin, and vitamins A, D, and B12. They also provide zinc, selenium, iodine, niacin, and pantothenic acid, all essential nutrients for growing children’s bodies and brains. Whole milk is especially important for young children ages 1 to 10 because of its role in supporting energy needs, brain, and nerve development.

For years, American families were told that the naturally occurring saturated fat in foods like milk increased disease risk. But as low-fat and fat-free products became standard in schools, children’s health worsened. Childhood obesity, diabetes, fatty liver disease, ADHD, and other chronic conditions continued to rise. Whole milk’s return will not solve the childhood health crisis by itself, but it does represent a meaningful step in the right direction.

A Win for Farmers and Families

The rule also matters for America’s dairy farmers, who have long argued that school milk restrictions reduced demand for foundational farm products and weakened the connection between children, schools, and agricultural food.

Dairy farms remain an important part of rural America, and school milk programs have historically served as a bridge between local food production and children’s nutrition. By restoring whole and 2% milk options, USDA is supporting both children and the farmers who produce one of America’s most familiar traditional foods.

USDA says it is also continuing the multi-year process of updating school meal standards based on the latest Dietary Guidelines for Americans. In the meantime, the department says it is taking immediate action to increase access to real, nutrient-rich foods in schools and child nutrition settings, including local beef and locally grown foods.

For MAHA, the significance is real. The school cafeteria is where federal nutrition policy becomes part of a child’s daily life, and restoring whole milk as an option is one step toward bringing real food back to the center of that daily routine.

While the return of whole milk may not transform school nutrition overnight, but it marks a clear shift in federal food policy for children. After years of restricting healthy fats in school meals, USDA is now giving schools more flexibility to serve more nutrient dense food options that support children’s growth and strengthen the connection between families, schools, and American farmers.

The final rule does not force schools to serve whole milk, but it reopens the door after years of federal restrictions. For MAHA, that is the point: giving schools the freedom to put real food back within reach of children.

As Secretary Rollins stated, whole milk is “the right move for kids, for parents, and for America’s dairy farmers.”

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This directive comes from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and can be considered a major win for MAHA – and for the FDA, which for years has been trying to rein in widespread SNAP fraud.

Retailers who accept SNAP benefits have until November 4 to comply with the new stocking standards. The change will be most noticeable at small stores.

“No more bare-minimum stocking or loopholes that let junk snacks count as ‘staple foods,’” USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins wrote in a post on X on Thursday, May 7, adding that the change more than doubles the requirements to stock fresh food for stores accepting SNAP, also called food stamps.

“Under the old rule, the 240,000 retailers who accepted the food stamp, they had to stock 12 or more, quote, nutritious food [items] – real food. Well, today, we’re more than doubling that to 28,” Rollins said on “Mornings with Maria” on Fox Business. “But we’re also closing the loophole. So, Maria, before today you could stock jelly as a fruit and jerky as a real protein. All that changes today.”

Jelly is not fruit

Everyone who’s been in a Dollar General store or a Dollar Tree has probably seen that they accept SNAP benefits, allowing people who have EBT cards to use them to pay for any food they choose. But they may also have also noticed that the majority of such stores do not have fresh produce – only canned and boxed foods; and in coolers, milk and some packaged meat and cheese. Jelly was their “fruit” to qualify as a SNAP retailer.

Now retailers most likely have to stock real fruit and vegetables as the new USDA regulation requires perishable items in three of the four staple food categories.

SNAP, also referred to as the Food Stamp program, doled out a stunning $95 billion last year to reimburse stores for SNAP purchases – more than $260 million a day, on average. The retailers include Wal-Mart and other superstores, grocery stores, many convenience stores and dollar stores – and, in larger cities, bodegas.

As of January, almost 21 million American households were using SNAP benefits, down from almost 23 million in January 2025.

Many Americans would be surprised to learn that in some grocery stores in America, half of all shoppers are using SNAP benefits to buy their food, via an EBT card.

The list of things that can’t be purchased with SNAP benefits is relatively short: beer, wine and liquor; cigarettes and tobacco; vitamins and supplements; any hot food; and live animals, with the exception of shellfish that have been removed from the water.

What can be purchased with SNAP is about everything else that can be consumed, including: soda (in most states), candy (in most states), cookies, donuts, potato chips, filet mignon, oysters, crab legs, custom-made bakery cakes, ice cream, and party packs of snacks.

A total of 22 states have now been granted waivers by the USDA to prohibit purchases of soda and candy using SNAP benefits. But even these prohibitions are relatively soft. Florida, for example, just banned SNAP use for soda, energy drinks, candy and “ultra-processed prepared desserts” like Twinkies and Oreos. But SNAP can still be used to buy Gatorade, Pop Tarts, and Marshmallows.

The new SNAP regulation requiring the stocking of more fresh food comes in the wake of the defeat of an amendment to the U.S. Farm Bill that would have banned all purchases of soda using SNAP, nationwide. The amendment was introduced by Rep. Keith Self (R-Texas) but was defeated by a vote of 238-186, with 55 Republicans joining 183 Democrats in opposition, demonstrating the power of lobbying groups like the National Beverage Association, which represents both Coca-Cola and Pepsico.

In 2025, at a Cabinet meeting at the White House, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told the story of soda industry lobbyists pressuring USDA Secretary Rollins to allow SNAP to continue to be used to buy soda.

“She pointed out to them that there is no nutrition in a soda,” Kennedy told President Trump. “And they said, ‘Well, it’s not supposed to be about nutrition.’ And she said to them, ‘The name of the program is the Supplemental NUTRITION Assistance Program.’”

That got a big laugh from other Cabinet members and even members of the media who were attending the event (Allowing SNAP benefits to be used to buy soda seems silly to most Americans as it’s at odds with the stated reason for the program: to provide Americans with nutritional foods).

The first Food Stamp program in America began in 1939, during the Great Depression, as a way to use farm surpluses to feed hungry people. While it still does serve as a lifeline for the elderly and the disabled, and many other Americans who don’t earn enough to be able to cover the cost of basic groceries, it’s also being used by people who could pay, but would rather not pay, for their own food – preferring to buy a lot of things that do not qualify as nutrition.

About 10 percent of SNAP benefits are spent on purchases of soda, according to a 2016 government study, making soda the No. 1 most popular item purchased with SNAP benefits.

“We have 38 percent of our kids [who] are diabetic or pre-diabetic,” Kennedy said at that Cabinet meeting in the summer of 2025, “And we are paying on both ends. We are paying for the food – the food-like substances that make them diabetic – and then we’re spending a trillion dollars a year on metabolic dysfunction. It’s existential and it’s not sustainable.”

Dollar General is now one of the largest retailers in America with more than 20,800 stores as of March. Eighty percent of these stores serve communities with populations of 20,000 or under – many of them lacking a real grocery store. All of them accept SNAP. About 7,000 of the stores now have fresh produce, twice as many as five years ago. But the remaining 13,000 sell no fruits or vegetables, consigning regular shoppers to finding a way to make dinner using only canned and boxed foods, or choose from among the limited items in coolers and freezers.

The new stocking standards for SNAP retailers are meant to ensure a broader variety of nutritious food is available to Americans who use SNAP benefits to buy their groceries.

“To turn the tide on our nation’s health crisis, we need to ensure our nutrition assistance programs emphasize real food first, and that’s exactly what these updates to retailer requirements will do,” Rollins said in the USDA press release announcing the change.

Turn over almost any package of ultra-processed food, and you will find a long list of ingredients that are difficult to pronounce and definitely not something our great-grandparents would recognize. Yet the assumption remains: if it is in the food supply, it must have been reviewed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for safety…right?

In many cases, this is simply not true.

For decades, thousands of chemical substances have entered the American food supply through a regulatory loophole known as “generally recognized as safe,” or GRAS. They entered without formal review or mandatory disclosure to the FDA – and, in some cases, without any publicly available safety data.

Even more striking is what is unknown. Because companies are not required to notify the government of self-affirmed GRAS determinations, there is no complete accounting of how many such substances are currently in the U.S. food supply.

“The GRAS loophole has allowed food companies to decide for themselves whether a chemical is safe, without notifying the FDA,” said HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “That is a clear conflict of interest, and it undermines public trust.”

Kennedy added, “We are going to fix the GRAS system so that chemicals cannot be added to food without oversight. The American people deserve to know what is in their food and that it has been independently evaluated for safety.”

Watching GRAS Grow

The modern GRAS framework began with the Food Additives Amendment of 1958, when Congress created a premarket approval system for new food additives while deliberately exempting substances already widely recognized as safe. At the time, this category was relatively small and logical, covering ingredients like salt, vinegar, spices, and oils with long histories of human use in cooking.

Early efforts by the FDA in the 1960s and 1970s sought to formalize GRAS ingredients by publishing lists and a comprehensive review program that evaluated hundreds of substances already in the food supply. However, regulators acknowledged a fundamental limitation: it was impracticable to identify and evaluate every substance and every use as the food system rapidly industrialized.

By the 1970s and 1980s, the scale of the problem had grown. The FDA began issuing formal “GRAS affirmation” regulations, but the process was slow, resource-intensive, and unable to keep pace with the expanding number of ingredients and novel uses. During this time, roughly 700 to 1,000 substances had been formally recognized or reviewed as GRAS, but this represented only a portion of those actually in use. In practice, companies increasingly relied on independent scientific experts to make safety determinations, as FDA oversight struggled to keep pace.

The most consequential shift came in 1997, when the FDA proposed replacing the GRAS process with a voluntary notification system. This change did not come from a single political directive but from a convergence of regulatory pressure, industry influence, and administrative reality. The FDA faced significant backlog and resource constraints, while the food and ingredient industries were pushing for a more efficient pathway to bring products to market. Trade associations representing food manufacturers, chemical suppliers, and ingredient producers had long advocated for reducing their burden of bringing new products to market, arguing that existing scientific expertise within industry could support safety determinations more efficiently than waiting for the FDA.

.Over time, this contributed to a model in which safety assessments became increasingly privatized, with companies convening their own “expert” panels and generating their own data that was not required to be shared with the FDA.

Under the 1997 proposal, companies could self-determine that a substance was GRAS and were encouraged, but not required, to notify the FDA. This shift was framed as a modernization effort, but it fundamentally altered the structure of oversight. From that point forward, GRAS became a system in which new substances could enter the food supply without mandatory FDA review or ANY disclosure of safety data.

Since the late 1990s, this decentralized model has defined the modern GRAS landscape. The FDA has received and reviewed over 1,000 voluntary GRAS notices, creating a partial public record of substances evaluated through the notification pathway. However, independent analyses and policy reviews suggest that thousands more self-affirmed GRAS determinations exist outside of FDA oversight, meaning the total number of substances in use is not fully known.

What began in 1958 as a narrow, common-sense exemption for household ingredients used in cooking has grown into a way for industry to skirt the FDA and introduce thousands of new chemicals into the food supply for use in ultra-processed foods.

The Dose Makes the Poison — or Does It?

One of the clearest ways to understand the limitations of the GRAS framework is to look at how these substances actually appear in our food supply. Some of the least transparent categories include flavoring agents, such as natural and artificial flavors, as well as processing aids used during manufacturing, such as hexane, ammonium hydroxide, and dimethylpolysiloxane, which often do not even appear on labels.

While terms such as “natural flavor” may sound familiar and safe, they often refer to complex mixtures of dozens or even hundreds of chemical compounds. Much of the underlying safety data is proprietary and not publicly available, yet these substances are allowed in the food supply under GRAS.

A second layer of complexity lies in how GRAS is applied.

Carboxymethylcellulose (CMC), a synthetic thickener derived from plant fiber, may be considered safe when used in small amounts in a single product. But in reality, it is consumed across many ultra-processed foods, often multiple times per day, and in combination with other emulsifiers such as lecithin, polysorbate 60, and polysorbate 80. It is important to note that GRAS applies to a specific use in a specific food, but not to chronic and potentially cumulative exposure across a person’s life.

Emerging research suggests that some emulsifiers, including CMC, may alter the gut microbiome and intestinal lining with chronic exposure, effects not captured in traditional GRAS evaluations focused on acute toxicity. The result is a system that evaluates ingredients in isolation, whereas in reality, Americans who consume ultra-processed foods, now accounting for 60%-70% of calories in the “Standard American Diet,” are exposed to complex mixtures daily.

Why Reform Is Now on the Table

Secretary Kennedy has made reforming the GRAS loophole a priority, with recent statements and policy signals from the HHS and FDA indicating that efforts are underway to reevaluate and strengthen oversight of the GRAS pathway.

While formal rule changes have not yet been implemented, the agencies have outlined plans to increase transparency, modernize safety standards, and consider reforms to the current self-affirmation process that underpins the GRAS loophole.

At the same time, industry pushback has been significant. Trade groups argue that mandatory notification could exceed FDA authority, create regulatory bottlenecks, and disrupt supply chains. Others raise concerns about whether reforms will require retroactive review of ingredients used for decades.

These tensions highlight what is at stake. Not just regulatory efficiency, but the fundamental question of who determines what is safe.

A Defining MAHA Priority

Closing the GRAS loophole is about restoring a fundamental standard: that safety determinations in the American food supply are transparent, independently evaluated, and grounded in modern, gold-standard science.

For clinicians and government leaders alike, this represents a rare opportunity to move upstream and acknowledge that the ingredients in our food supply are foundational drivers of health across a lifespan. It is an opportunity to realign the system itself with that reality, prioritizing long-term health over short-term convenience.

For families, this moment invites a more critical question: what does “safe” truly mean? And until that standard is strengthened, it reinforces the importance of choosing whole, minimally processed foods whenever possible.

The HHS and the FDA are now beginning the important work of restoring accountability in the American food system and rebuilding trust in the institutions responsible for protecting public health. This moment demands more than incremental change. It requires a clear commitment to closing long-standing loopholes and ensuring that industry interests do not stall reform or rely on anything other than transparent, gold-standard science.

Secretary Kennedy and team are seizing the opportunity to finally close the gap between what is assumed to be safe and what is proven to be safe, and to put public health where it belongs: first.

Ultra-processed food was the focus of the April 1, 2026 MAHA Media Hub, which featured a clutch of experts, including food activist and author, Vani Hari; Senior Advisor in the Office of HHS Secretary, Calley Means; “The Knowledge Doc,” Dr. Eric Berg; and family medicine doctor and bestselling author, Dr. Cate Shanahan – among others.

MAHA Action President, Tony Lyons, kicked things off by defining “ultra-processed” food as food that has been so heavily processed that it is almost devoid of nutrients. During his brief report, Means noted that HHS is now working on a comprehensive definition of “ultra-processed” that will help Americans make better decisions about what food to buy, and what foods to avoid.

A lot of the food that counts as “ultra-processed” contains seed oils, which have been identified by many nutrition experts as particularly harmful given their wide use in snack foods consumed by millions of Americans, and the evidence that they cause inflammation that often leads to chronic disease.

Dr. Shanahan spoke passionately about the dangers of what she has identified as the worst seed oils – “The Hateful Eight.” She’s the author, most recently, of Dark Calories: How Vegetable Oils Destroy Our Health and How We Can Get It Back.

As you’ll read in the transcription below, Dr. Shanahan’s calls out these harmful oils: corn oil, canola oil, cottonseed oil, soy, sunflower oil, safflower oil, rice bran oil and grape seed oil.

From the MAHA Media Hub, April 1, 2026 [edited lightly for clarity]

Tony Lyons: Next up, we have Dr. Cate Shanahan. She’s a board certified family medicine doctor, a former nutrition consultant for the LA Lakers and a New York Times bestselling author whose work has brought ancestral eating principles to millions and millions of people. Her research and her clinical insights have helped catalyze a growing movement towards seed-oil-free, real food nutrition. She’s currently launching an online course designed to help busy people master all the habits and the strategies of eating real food, unprocessed food, making it easy and affordable, and something that people can really manage day to day. So thanks so much, Cate, for all the work that you’re doing.

Cate Shanahan: Thank you so much for having me on. And it’s an honor to be on here with everybody else.

I’m here because as a child, as a young woman, as an athlete, I was suffering every day from the effects of processed food but I didn’t know it. My parents didn’t know it, my doctors didn’t. Nobody could help me. Nobody could explain why I kept getting injured. And it wasn’t until I got so seriously injured, after I’d gone to medical school, that I did something that was really hard that almost no doctors ever have to do. And that is to question the narrative. And I discovered that I’ve been lied to about saturated fat.

Now, why does this matter? Because we are talking about processed food. We are eating processed foods because of this lie about saturated fats. Well, you have to, if you think about it, when you take away saturated fat, you take away butter, you take away animal fats, you take away most animal products. These are fresh foods. When you take away easy, delicious, fresh foods that probably have some kind of a super high accelerator index, but they never test like fresh meat or hamburgers, I don’t think, against processed food. These foods are delicious. But, we were told, doctors learned that saturated fat is bad. Therefore, these delicious foods, we can’t eat them.

This chases us towards processed foods. And this process began, this process of scaring people away from real foods and chasing us towards processed foods, began so many generations ago that almost nobody is alive anymore who remembers that there was a time when doctors told people to drink whole milk and to eat butter. And I want everybody on this call to understand…if you take away nothing else, one thing from what I have to say, that is the worst of the worst of the processed food ingredients, are the seed oils.

I call them the hateful eight, because there’s eight of them. Corn, canola, cotton seed, soy, sunflower, safflower, rice bran, and grape seed. These are refined and they are unstable and they develop toxins in the bottles after they leave the factory that doctors and dieticians know nothing about. These toxins are so potent that they’re including things like aldehyde – so when people work with these toxins, they have to wear hazmat suits.

Seed oils are the worst thing in the food supply, partly because they are so ubiquitous. I work with people every day who also are suffering from the effects of processed food and don’t know it. And I have to tell them that they’ve been eating more seed oils than they realize, even if they don’t cook with them at home, because they are in 80% of the foods that we eat in the grocery store. Most people who aren’t consciously avoiding them are getting 20 to 30% of their total daily calories from seed oils. And they are not just in obvious processed foods or things that we know are unhealthy, right? We all know fried food is unhealthy. We all know sacks of chips are not healthy. Well, I’m here to tell you that the reason that they are so unhealthy is the seed oils. It’s not the salt. It’s not the potatoes and chips. It’s the seed oils and what they do to our bodies.

I’ve made understanding exactly what they do to our bodies the focus of my professional career. So far, I’ve filled up five books with how these oils and the other two main ingredients in processed foods – refined carbs and refined proteins were already called out. I write about how these things lead to specific diseases.

Just to give you an example: I recently broke a leg. And I have some help here now that I didn’t need before. And the young lady who was helping me, she is a go-getter. She is amazing. She is overqualified to do what she’s doing to help me. But she is being held back in her life and her career because she has a son who she loves that is autistic. And he needs so much of her care and so much of her time that she can’t work more than 24 hours a week.

This is preventable. I know the administration is looking for the cause [of autism]. Well, I’m here to tell you that an overlooked factor has been the seed oils. Seed oils have components, foods cooked in seed oils have components that are known neurotoxins. They are known genotoxins, they are known to cause birth defects. They are known to cause mutations and cancers. And because dieticians, physicians, and healthcare researchers believe that they’re the healthy alternative to animal fats, our entire, almost our entire nutrition research regimen so far has overlooked these oils as potential agents of disease.

And, in fact, the structural blind spots and biases around saturated fat have prevented seed oils from even being evaluated properly so that dieticians and doctors think that they have been evaluated and they think that medical science has tested them. But the fact is they have never been tested as independent variables.

In the past 30 years of medical research, which is most of what anybody in healthcare will be able to access and go back to. So the corn, canola, cotton seed, soy, sunflower, safflower, memorize those. Those are ingredients in your stores. That’s the first six. The last two – rice bran, grape seed. If you can get these out of your life, that is the most important step you can take to improving your health. You will notice a difference. And it’s not just because you’re cutting out processed food, it’s because these are toxins and it’s a shameful legacy of American medicine that we have not only not pointed these out, but that we’ve promoted them as heart healthy for generations.

Thank you very much.

For more on seed oils read, “The ‘Hateful Eight’ Seed Oils Most Americans Don’t Know – But Should”