Targeting young people, like the tobacco industry had to keep replacing their customers who were dying with new customers. knows they have to target … - Michele Simon

The promotion of dairy products in schools is especially troubling, where children are a captive audience and greatly influenced by the foods served there. That’s why the dairy industry wants to maintain its strong presence in schools, despite local and federal efforts to improve the nutritional quality of school food.

Federal government administers, oversees, and approves almost every aspect of the dairy checkoff program. These funds are used to promote junk foods, which contribute to the very diseases our federal government is allegedly trying to prevent.

At a time when our nation is suffering from an epidemic of diet-related health problems, we cannot allow whitewashing by the industry to continue. The assumption that eating dairy is essential to the diet has obstructed our ability to criticize federal government support for unhealthy forms of dairy. The large and powerful players in the dairy industry are the masters of spin. For decades, lobbyists and marketers have promoted milk as “nature’s perfect food.” But consumption patterns have shifted away from plain fluid milk to highly processed forms of dairy that are little more than vessels for salt, sugar, and fat.