Time to Question Everything You Know About Milk

We reviewed over 100 studies and conclude that milk recommendations for Americans are not based in evidence

Photo: Jack Andersen/Getty Images

It’s perhaps the most widely advocated nutrition recommendation of the last half-century: For strong bones and overall health, consume three servings of reduced-fat milk a day.

The USDA’s “ChooseMyPlate” dedicates a corner of their icon for milk and equivalent dairy products (Figure 1).

Schools must offer fat-free or 1% low-fat milk at lunch and other meals. To get kids to drink it, the government allows chocolate and other sugary varieties — but not plain whole milk!

Figure 1. The USDA’s ChooseMyPlate Icon.

And celebrities from Jennifer Aniston to Taylor Swift have donned the milk mustache, assuring us that milk does a body good.

To comply with this recommendation, Americans would need to double their intake (now averaging one and a half glasses a day), which would amount to billions of extra gallons a year. However, my colleague Walter Willet at Harvard and I examined over 100 studies and we conclude, in a new article in New England Journal of Medicine…