When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. became health and human services secretary, advocates for raw milk were thrilled to have one of their own at the helm in Washington. A self-professed fan of the drink, Kennedy had included raw milk in a list of foods and drugs that he felt federal officials had unfairly suppressed.
“FDA’s war on public health is about to end,” he wrote shortly after the November election.
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WATCH HEREBut Kennedy hasn’t actively taken up the cause yet — even amid his sweeping effort to upend federal health agencies and his Make America Healthy Again campaign to change how Americans eat, frustrating and concerning some of the most prominent raw milk advocates.
Federal officials have long warned that raw milk is unsafe for drinking because it hasn’t gone through the heat process of pasteurization that kills off harmful bacteria, and sales across state lines have been banned since 1987.
Kennedy helped champion and elevate raw milk and has criticized resistance from health officials, but he has yet to relax federal rules or reverse warnings against drinking it. His inaction so far is in contrast to his campaigns against childhood vaccines and artificial food dyes, longtime causes now at the center of his efforts as secretary.
The Department of Health and Human Services didn’t respond to questions seeking comment about Kennedy’s plans.
Mark McAfee, one of the country’s leading raw milk producers, had expected to advise Kennedy’s department on ways to support raw milk farmers and expand access to consumers and hoped to help reverse the federal government’s official stance that raw milk is too risky to consume. McAfee said he had been in close touch with Nicole Shanahan, Kennedy’s presidential running mate, who interviewed him for a video she produced about raw milk.
McAfee said that Kennedy texted him in February, shortly after his confirmation, that he would be in touch — but that there has been silence since then. A recent federal report on children’s health commissioned by President Donald Trump — titled “The MAHA Report”— stressed the importance of whole milk and other unprocessed foods but made no mention of raw milk, even though Kennedy celebrated its release by doing shots of raw milk at the White House with a leading health influencer last month.
The Food and Drug Administration’s stance that “raw milk puts all consumers at risk” because of potential contamination hasn’t been changed or updated, nor has the federal ban on selling it across state lines. And when McAfee recently reached out to the FDA for a meeting, he was rebuffed.
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SIGN UP “It appears that the FDA culture will continue its war against raw milk,” McAfee said.
There’s a long-standing consensus among U.S. public health agencies that pasteurization is an essential step to kill bacteria in milk — one of the most important mainstays of the American diet, especially for children. Then again, there’s also consensus that vaccines don’t cause autism and that they’re necessary for public health and safety, and that hasn’t stopped Kennedy from raising the issue.
“We’ve had this message, all of these decades, that raw milk is dangerous,” said Judith McGeary, executive director of the Farm and Ranch Alliance in Texas, which has advocated for expanding access to raw milk. “It’s not going to change overnight, no matter who’s in charge.”
Meghan Davis, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University, said the federal warnings and restrictions on selling raw milk have been in place for good reason. “Humans drank raw milk for a long time, but they got diseases from it for a long time,” said Davis, a former dairy veterinarian. “Raw milk is among the more risky of the foodstuffs that we can consume.”
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Without pasteurization, which heats milk to high temperatures, raw milk is likelier to transmit dangerous pathogens like E. coli, salmonella, listeria and campylobacter, Davis said.
But raw milk advocates like McAfee argue that the risks have been overstated and the health and nutritional benefits have been undersold, arguing that consuming raw milk provides healthy gut bacteria, decreases asthma and allergies and strengthens our immune systems — all claims the FDA challenged in a post last year about “raw milk misconceptions.”
Peg Coleman, a raw milk advocate and former Agriculture Department microbiologist, argues that a “pro-pasteurization bias” remains entrenched in federal agencies and wants Kennedy’s Health and Human Services Department to take down such information.
But even despite the persistence of such warnings, “there is the demand,” she said. “People are still choosing raw milk.”
Like many of the other health trends and beliefs that Kennedy has embraced, raw milk was once considered a fringe health food associated with the new-age left that has transformed into a signifier of the right — a mainstay of the MAHA health influencers in Kennedy’s orbit and a rallying cry for conservatives who have pushed states to legalize raw milk sales and oppose government crackdowns on unlicensed raw milk producers.
Small farmers, especially, have successfully lobbied both blue and red states to legalize sales as a way to diversify their offerings, overcoming major opposition from the pasteurized milk industry.
But the sale of raw milk remains banned across state lines. And even though new state laws have expanded access and expanded raw milk production, sales remain highly restricted in most states: Only 14 permit retail sales to consumers. In many others, consumers must buy it on site from farms. And state health officials typically look to federal health agencies for guidance about safety.
While some states have their own safety rules and testing requirements for raw milk, there are no federal standards or guidance for producers.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that from 1998 to 2018, drinking raw milk was linked to 2,645 illnesses and 228 hospitalizations. The agency also found that outbreaks linked to unpasteurized dairy products are far more likely than those linked to pasteurized dairy.
While the overall numbers are low compared with other raw foods like oysters and leafy greens, such foods are consumed far more widely.
Davis added that more research is necessary to prove that specific standards or testing protocols are effective at making raw milk safe or safer to consume. “We have to do that study,” she said.
Valerie Plesch for The Washington Post via Getty Images file
McAfee’s own raw milk has been subject to multiple voluntary recalls, as well as outbreaks of foodborne illness. California officials linked raw milk from his company, Raw Farm, to dozens of salmonella cases in 2023. McAfee said the company has since strengthened its testing protocols and created an on-site pathogen lab to prevent future problems.
“We learned from that incident,” he said. “We owned that we had a problem, and we fixed it.” Last year, the company also issued a recall after its raw milk tested positive for bird flu but said its products were never associated with any infections.
McAfee says that proper guidelines and testing can make raw milk safe to drink — and that the federal government has an important role to play in establishing safety standards. He drafted a proposal for the FDA to develop standards and guidance for raw milk producers, which he sent to the agency after Kennedy became health and human services secretary.
“We are not looking for the FDA to regulate raw milk, but we would love to have the best FDA scientists in the world acknowledge the benefits of raw milk, if it is produced under the High Standards that we will discuss,” McAfee wrote in a recent email to FDA officials that he shared with NBC News.
The FDA turned him down. “Given our need to balance agency priorities, the Human Foods Program respectfully declines your request for a meeting at this time, though we remain open to dialogue with the raw milk industry,” Donald Prater, principal deputy director of the FDA’s Human Foods Program, wrote in response.
The FDA didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Kelsey Barefoot of Dunn, North Carolina, who became a raw milk producer in 2021, said, “It’s our basic human right to be able to have the freedom to choose our food.” As a former critical care nurse, Barefoot was taught about the dangers of raw milk, but she said she was won over after she tried it herself.
“I had been prepared to think that raw milk was going to kill me,” Barefoot said. “I started drinking it. I loved it. I didn’t die, and my kids drank it, and so I started producing the milk for myself.”
She now works for the Raw Milk Institute, founded by McAfee, which seeks to support “low-risk raw milk production” through safety standards and testing protocols, including test results that are publicly posted.
The advocates haven’t given up on Kennedy, bolstered by the MAHA movement’s push to eradicate food dyes and other top concerns. It may just take more time for him to come around, McAfee said. “It’s really, really crowded with people trying to saturate him. He’s trying to sort things out.”
Sally Fallon Morell, founding president of the Weston A. Price Foundation, a nonprofit alternative nutrition organization, said she first spoke with Kennedy about milk in 2021, when she was seated next to him at the foundation's annual holistic health conference, held that year in Texas.
She said Kennedy recalled drinking raw milk when he was a child and said he wished he were drinking it again but wasn’t sure where to find it. Morell directed him to a website her foundation had set up, which had a searchable database of raw milk purveyors. The following year, Kennedy was invited to speak at the same conference.
“Since I was here last year, I only drink raw milk,” he said from the stage. The audience burst into applause.
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