Lifestyle Sports: Latest from Food Politics: The latest push to get nutrition into medical education: maybe this time it will work?

By Marion Nestle

March 10 2026

The latest push to get nutrition into medical education: maybe this time it will work?

Last week’s big announcement: Secretary Kennedy and Secretary McMahon Celebrate Medical School Commitments to Increase Nutrition Training for Future Doctors

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the U.S. Department of Education convened leaders from 53 of the nation’s top medical schools across 31 states today to announce commitments to require meaningful nutrition training for future doctors beginning in the next academic year…A 2022 survey published in the Journal of Wellness found that medical students reported receiving an average of 1.2 hours of formal nutrition education each year.

From the Fact Sheet on the initiative:

Even as our nation spends $4.4 trillion annually on treating chronic disease and mental health, an estimated one million Americans die from food-related chronic illnesses each year. To reverse the chronic disease epidemic, health care professionals must be trained to recognize, diagnose, treat, and prevent diet-related diseases.

Nutrition education is sorely lacking in America’s medical training. Historically, less than 1% of total lecture hours in U.S. medical schools has been devoted to nutrition education. As of 2024, 75% of U.S. medical schools required no clinical nutrition classes. Medical students surveyed in 2022 reported receiving an average of 1.2 hours of formal nutrition education each year. Only 14% of residency programs require a nutrition curriculum; only 14% of current health care providers feel comfortable discussing nutrition with their patients.

The list of medical schools that have agreed to participate is here.

Some background

In January, Secretary Kennedy sent a letter to medical schools calling on them to increase nutrition teaching.

HHS welcomes your participation to implement, beginning in fall 2026, either: 1) a minimum of 40 hours of required nutrition education across all four years of undergraduate medical education; or 2) a minimum 40-hour competency equivalent. We encourage your university to display on a public website a detailed plan for achieving, tracking, and assessing your progress.

The letter suggested 71 nutrition competiencies from which schools could pick.

Some ways your university could do this are:
1. Conduct a comprehensive baseline assessment of your current nutrition curriculum and identify any gaps or opportunities that exist.
2. Identify a faculty champion to lead development and ensure sustained implementation.
3. Formalize your institution’s commitment by posting your nutrition education implementation plan and participation as an active partner in this initiative on your website.

Comment

I have written any number of previous posts about this topic. I taught nutrition to students at the USCF School of Medicine fron 1976-1986 and had a federal grant to do so early on. Even then, it had been 20 years since the American Medical Association held its first conference on nutrition education in medical schools. It has now been more than 60 years since those first calls with remarkably little progress.

This is not for lack of trying.

My most recent contribution to this cause: Nestle M, Baron RB. Nutrition in Medical Education: From Counting Hours to Measuring Competence. JAMA Intern Med. Published online April 14, 2014. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2014.440.
In 2024, medial educators, Eisenberg DM, Cole A, Maile EJ, et al., published Proposed Nutrition Competencies for Medical Students and Physician Trainees: A Consensus Statement. JAMA Netw Open. 2024;7(9):e2435425. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.35425 (I particularly like competency #1: “Provides evidence-based, culturally sensitive nutrition and food recommendations to patients for the prevention and treatment of disease.”

But the barriers have been—and remain—formidible.

The focus of medical care on treatment, not prevention
The lack of qualified instructors (“champions”)
The lack of nutrition departments in medical schools (departments own curriculum time)
The lack of curriculum time
The lack of reinforcement of didactic training at the bedside
The absurdly short time available for encounters between doctors an patients
The complexities of diet and health

Yes, medical students should be taught nutrition, no question. But how? From my now lengthy experience with all this, I think medical students need to know:

How to recognize a nutrition problem in a patient (not as easy as it sounds)
How to refer patients to professional dietetions or nutritionists
How to identify good ones to work with (not as hard as it sounds)

What I find utterly remarkable about RFK Jr’s list of competencies is how closely most of them resemble the required competencies for dietitians.

And this entire initiative is voluntary.

If Secretary Kennedy really wants medical schools to teach nutrition, he needs get the medical schools to develop a core curriculum and require it, and also get them funded to support that work.

Press account: The New York Times — Dozens of Medical Schools Back Kennedy Plan on Nutrition After Pressure

One last comment: some of the competencies go way beyond dietetics and address food systems, such as:

#48: Regenerative agriculture as clinical intervention: understand practices restoring soil microbiota and yielding nutrient-dense food
#66 Nutrient density and soil health: understand relationship between soil microbiota diversity and minerat/nutrient content of foods
#67 Regenerative agriculture immersion: participate in on-site learning at farms including soil sampling, composting, crop rotation
#70 Environmental contaminant case studies: review clinical cases linking food-based
exposures to patient outcomes

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