School Meal Final Rule: More Of The Same Failed Ideas

USDA’s final rule updating the nutrition standards for the National School Lunch and School Breakfast Programs, published in the Federal Register and detailed on our front page last week, represents a mixed bag, at best, for the dairy industry.

Among other things, the final rule requires schools to offer only plain or flavored fat-free milk and unflavored lowfat milk; reduce the sodium content of school meals; and reduce the saturated fat content of school meals.

There’s very little to really like about the milk requirements in the final rule. Yes, fluid milk must be offered with every school meal, which is certainly not a bad idea.

But the limits on the fat content of that milk are foolish, and might end up doing more harm than good. And USDA has this evidence right in front of it, but chose to ignore it.

Obviously, one of the main goals of this final rule on school meals is to reduce the prevalence of childhood obesity. But for several decades now, whole milk consumption has been declining, while consumption of lower-fat milk products has been rising.

The net result: more consumers than ever are overweight or obese.

Further, for a number of years whole milk was served in the school lunch program, but in recent years whole milk has been phased out in favor of lower-fat milks.

Again, the net result: more kids than ever are overweight or obese.

There are a couple of additional problems with this requirement for lowfat or fat-free milk only. First, obviously, young people are in the early stages of forming consumption habits that will be with them for many years to come.

Unfortunately, fat-free or lowfat milk are the two milk products with the least flavor. So as kids are developing their preferences, they’re being limited (at least in school) to two relatively flavorless fluid milk products.
That doesn’t bode well for future milk consumption, which could use all the help it can get.

That’s really too bad, because the difference in calories between 2 percent milk and 1 percent milk is all of 20 calories.

Second, this milk requirement continues a decades-long campaign, on the part of the federal government, to bash anything and everything that contains fat, particularly saturated fat.

But some recent research has concluded that maybe saturated fat isn’t as bad as we have been led to believe. Just to cite one example: a review published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition a little over a year ago found no association between high intakes of either regular-fat or lowfat dairy products and increased risk of death from cardiovascular disease.

This hasn’t altered the approach of the US government, which has since at least 1980, when the first edition of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans was released, urged consumers to reduce their consumption of fat in general and saturated fat in particular.

That continued in the latest Dietary Guidelines, which encouraged increased consumption of fat-free or lowfat dairy products. And the new school meal regulations are based on that latest edition of the Dietary Guidelines.

At least one country appears to be taking a more moderate approach to saturated fat. Proposed Australian dietary guidelines recommend mostly reduced fat dairy products, which are defined as dairy products that contain at least 25 percent less fat than the equivalent full-fat product, and at least three grams less fat per 100 grams of food.

For what it’s worth, Australia’s obesity rate is considerably lower than the obesity rate in the US, according to several sources.

About the only positive we can find in the final school meal rule, when it comes to fluid milk, is that it appears to be prompting some improvements in flavored milk. Specifically, Dean Foods has reformulated its chocolate milk to contain less sugar, which is certainly a positive for both consumers and for the dairy industry.

USDA said reducing the sodium content of school meals is a key objective of the final rule it published last week, and here again the news is mostly bad for the dairy industry. USDA’s sodium reduction requirement is also based on the Dietary Guidelines for Americans.

As is the case with saturated fat, despite years of almost universal support for the alleged benefits of reducing sodium in the food supply, there is some interesting recent research that has concluded that reducing sodium too much can actually be detrimental to health. And the number of these studies is on the increase.

This is particularly troubling for the cheese industry, which has spent millions of dollars on research and development in recent years attempting to reduce the salt content of its products.

Now, the cheese industry (along with a lot of other skeptics) is learning that maybe sodium reduction doesn’t really provide the health benefits that it has long been purported to provide.

As is the case with fluid milk, there might be one small benefit here. That is, research conducted in recent years has found widespread variation in the sodium content of cheese, even within the same variety.
If the recent focus on sodium reduction helps the cheese industry achieve greater uniformity in the sodium content of its products, that’s definitely a positive outcome.

And there is one small piece of good news in the final rule, when it comes to sodium: Thanks to an agriculture appropriations bill passed late last year, the time given to reach the second intermediate targets for sodium reduction is lengthened from four to five years.

But no matter how you slice it, the fluid milk, saturated fat and sodium requirements in the school meal final rule will end up possibly turning consumers away from less-flavorful dairy products, have little or no actual health benefits, and might even be detrimental. DG

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