Alan Bjerga: Hello, and welcome to Dairy Defined. The new Dietary Guidelines for Americans is out, and it’s been good news for dairy. Whole milk is featured prominently in the new guide to American eating, with implications for federal programs and consumer behavior. Explaining the guidelines is Miquela Hanselman, NMPF director of regulatory affairs and its point person on nutrition policy. Thank you for joining us, Miquela.
Miquela Hanselman: Thanks for having me, Alan.
Alan Bjerga: Tell us how the guidelines are crafted and why they’re significant.
Miquela Hanselman: The guidelines I’ll start off with are significant because they impact all the nutrition programs that come out of USDA and overall federally. It is a lengthy process to update the dietary guidelines.
The first step is to identify scientific questions. The scientific questions are largely areas of nutrition research where there seems to be some changes that have come about because of newer research or there are different feelings among the nutrition community about what the guidelines should say, and so those scientific questions kind of pinpoint those areas. For example, one of the scientific questions this year, for this round, I should say, looked at sources of saturated fat and the health impacts based on those different sources.
Once the scientific questions are selected, then they also select an advisory committee, which is made up of nutritionists, registered dieticians, doctors, all of the authorities on nutrition, to review the science that will answer those scientific questions. This is a multi-year process, and then that committee eventually releases their scientific report, which explains where they landed on the answers to all of those questions. And that report is then taken by USDA and HHS to update and finalize the actual guidelines that everyone sees.
Throughout that process, National Milk was very active in providing comments and feedback to the agencies because they do take public comment as the process is moving along. I will say there was an administration change during this dietary guidelines revision, so that scientific report I was talking about came out under the Biden administration at the very end. And then the Trump administration came in, and they were the ones actually rewriting the dietary guidelines, the 2025-2030. They decided to develop their own foundations document, which speaks to basically everything they put in the guidelines and the science that led them to what is in their shorter dietary guidelines document.
Alan Bjerga: Going into this process, what were NMPF’s goals, and how did those goals work out?
Miquela Hanselman: I would say our main goal, of course, is to continue that recommendation of three servings of dairy, also for dairy to remain a distinct food group, and then for several rounds now, we’ve been advocating for full-fat dairy to be recommended in the dietary guidelines. Previously, it’s only been fat-free and 1% that are recommended in the guidelines, and this is actually the reason that whole milk and 2% were pulled out of school meals. Because 2010, when the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act was passed, that tied the dietary guidelines and school meals together, basically. So school meals had to abide by the dietary guidelines. That led to whole milk and 2% being pulled out. So I would say in the past decade, we’ve really been more forceful in our wanting for whole milk to make it back into the guidelines. So I would say when you look at the guidelines, we did pretty well on what our goals were going into it.
I would say the other big goal was for no plant-based alternatives to be included in the dairy group beyond fortified soy.
Alan Bjerga: And you touched on this a little bit, but in terms of reasons for dairy to smile over the guidelines, seems like a lot of things worked out, some things maybe even better than expected. And then I’d like to hear a little bit more about the plant-based in terms of anything in this guideline that might be something that needs to be fought another day.
Miquela Hanselman: Yeah, as you said, we turned out pretty well in the guidelines. We hit the three servings. Dairy is a distinct group. Full-fat dairy is recommended repeatedly throughout the guidelines, which everyone was very excited to see.
I would say on the plant-based side of things, in the actual guideline document, plant-based is not mentioned. It is only full-fat dairy that is mentioned and dairy products. But if you look at the calories document, daily servings by calorie level, you will see that in the dairy group, fortified dairy alternatives is listed out. Obviously, this raises some red flags on our side, because what does fortified dairy alternatives mean at the end of the day is that just almond beverage that has a lot of calcium in it, when we all know that a glass of milk has 13 essential nutrients.
But on the other side of that, I will say it is laid out in regulations that to be considered substitute for milk in school meals, alternatives have to meet certain levels of certain nutrients. So it does already say in regulation what a fortified dairy alternative should have in it to qualify to be used in a school meal.
Alan Bjerga: Now, of course, as all of this takes place with some pretty profound and important policy implications, there’s a political backdrop. You already mentioned that the Trump administration sort of had its own foundation in terms of where this moves along. At the same time, there was a scientific report that came out under the Biden administration. We hear a lot about the MAHA movement and prominent figures saying very good things about dairy. To what extent can we say really this is more than MAHA, this is something that has been a longer-time coming than any particular policy win?
Miquela Hanselman: So I would say this is the big piece for MAHA. This was something they had talked about leading up to the reveal and they’re talking about now as what is going to drive all the big changes for the MAHA movement. And this was their centerpiece in a lot of ways because it does impact school meals, it impacts the women, infant, and children supplemental feeding program, and that is why we do see the dietary guidelines as important as they are.
But on the flip side of that, I would say even the last administration was starting and had recognized dairy’s role in a healthy diet. So the scientific report that I talked about that came out under the last administration that was put together by that advisory committee continued to recommend three servings of dairy because when they did an analysis to try to reduce those number of servings, they realized there were going to be nutrient gaps for most Americans. They looked at sources of saturated fat, and while they didn’t fully come around to recommending whole milk, you could start to see that switch in the newer science and that they were reviewing and that there were some limited conclusions in favor of whole milk in the diets of children.
So I would say this is a big thing for the MAHA movement and that it helps push their agenda forward. But a lot of what they’re advocating for, fruits and vegetables, protein, dairy, are already things in the nutrition community that have been advocated for for a long time now.
Alan Bjerga: It sounds to me like this is actually, and maybe we should stop the press here for this, this is something that Americans of all political stripes could broadly agree upon. Is that correct?
Miquela Hanselman: You would think yes. You would hope also that, yes, we could all come together around wanting everyone to have access to the healthiest foods they can have.
Alan Bjerga: Well, we can raise a glass to that. We’ve been speaking with Miquela Hanselman, she’s the NMPF director of regulatory affairs, about the latest iteration of the dietary guidelines for Americans. Miquela, is there anything else you’d like to add before we go?
Miquela Hanselman: Enjoy your glass of whole milk that’s now recommended in the dietary guidelines.
Alan Bjerga: And that’s it for the Dairy Defined podcast. If you want to know more about NMPF’s regulatory efforts, you can go to the subscription page on our website, nmpf.org/subscribe, and sign up for our regulatory register that tells you about all the things we’re doing for dairy on the regulatory front. For more of these podcasts, all you have to do is go to the NMPF website or go to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Amazon Music, and search under the podcast name, Dairy Defined. Thank you for joining us.
