Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced a new push Thursday to get medical schools to teach more about nutrition.
Kennedy has spent months pressing schools to increase nutrition education, threatening funding cuts for those that refuse and promising public recognition for those that comply. He has long argued that doctors are undertrained in nutrition, leading to a focus on treating chronic diseases with medication rather than preventing them with diet, an approach that some experts say is oversimplified.
Fifty-two medical schools have voluntarily agreed to take part in the new initiative, senior Department of Health and Human Services officials told reporters on a call Wednesday. The officials declined to identify the schools and told reporters to expect statements from the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Medical Colleges, which creates the MCAT exam for medical school admission.
The new initiative asks medical schools to do three things: review how much nutrition training they provide, appoint a faculty member to oversee nutrition education and create a public page outlining how they plan to reach 40 hours of nutrition education for medical students.
The initiative is meant not to mandate a specific curriculum, the officials said, but to provide a framework that schools can adapt. Officials said the administration offered schools suggestions, which they did not detail.
The New York Times reported Wednesday that Kennedy wrote a letter to universities in January suggesting 71 topics, including food allergies, dietary supplements, wearable devices, composting and crop rotation. NBC News has not reviewed the letter.
“Although groups might not agree with the specific characterizations we’re using, there’s wide agreement that doctors in medical school could have more curriculum in nutrition,” an official said.
Doctors have argued for decades that medical schools should teach more about nutrition, said Marion Nestle, professor emerita of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University.
A 2015 study published in the Journal of Biomedical Education found medical students spend, on average, only 19 hours on nutrition education over their four years. The study surveyed 133 U.S. medical schools.
But as far back as the early 1960s, the American Medical Association reported that nutrition in the U.S. medical schools received “inadequate recognition, support and attention.”
In 1969, health experts at a White House Conference on Food, Nutrition, and Health concluded nutrition in medical education was inadequate and recommended making funds for future program development available.
“It would be lovely if doctors knew more about nutrition,” Nestle said in an email, “but given the way our health care system works — doctors have 15 minutes with patients — I see only two things they really need to know: how to recognize a nutrition problem when a patient needs one (not as easy as it sounds) and even more important, how to refer patients with nutrition problems to a dietitian.”
Dr. Adam Gaffney, a critical care physician and assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, said he supports schools’ expanding their nutrition curriculums, assuming the new material is “scientifically rigorous.”
However, he said, Kennedy’s premise has been “physicians do not know, care or talk about nutrition and so just push pills.”
“That premise is incorrect. It also misdiagnoses the problem,” Gaffney said. “Americans often eat unhealthily because of financial and time constraints and because unhealthy food is ubiquitous and convenient and cheap.”
Gaffney also said Kennedy has embraced “numerous pseudoscientific” medical ideas, from replacing seed oils with beef tallow, claiming it is a healthier alternative, to minimizing the role of vaccines in public health, pushing unsupported claims that the shots are linked to autism.
That “raises questions about what precisely they want to see added to existing nutritional teaching in medical schools,” Gaffney said.
