Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced a new campaign Thursday to get medical schools to teach more about nutrition.
Kennedy spent months pressuring schools to expand nutrition education, threatening funding cuts to those who refused and promising public recognition to those who complied. He has been pointing out for a long time that doctors are not managing nutrition well, which leads to focusing on treating chronic diseases with drugs rather than avoiding them through food, which is a method that some experts say is made too easy.
Fifty-two medical schools have voluntarily agreed to participate in the new program, senior officials from the Department of Health and Human Services told reporters on the phone Wednesday. Officials declined to identify the schools and told reporters they were awaiting statements from the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Medical Colleges, which created the MCAT test for medical school admissions.
The new plan asks medical schools to do three things: review how much nutrition training they offer, appoint a faculty member to oversee nutrition education and create a public page detailing how they plan to access 40 hours of nutrition education for medical students.
The plan is not designed to mandate a specific curriculum, officials said, but to provide a framework that schools can change. Officials say administrators have given schools recommendations, which they did not elaborate on.
The New York Times reported Wednesday that Kennedy wrote a letter to universities in January raising 71 topics, including food allergies, food additives, wearables, composting and crop rotation. NBC News did not review the letter.
“Although groups may not agree on the specifics we use, there is a great deal of agreement that doctors in medical school can have an additional curriculum in nutrition,” said the official.
Doctors have argued for decades that medical schools should teach more about nutrition, said Marion Nestle, associate professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University.
A 2015 study published in the Journal of Biomedical Education found that medical students spend, on average, only 19 hours on nutrition education during their four years. The study surveyed 133 US medical schools.
But as early as the 1960s, the American Medical Association reported that nutrition in United States medical schools was “lacking adequate recognition, support and attention.”
In 1969, health experts at the White House Conference on Food, Nutrition, and Health concluded that nutrition in medical education was inadequate and recommended that funds be made available for future program development.
“It would be good 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 need to know: how to recognize a nutritional problem when a patient needs one (not as easy as it sounds) and more importantly, how to refer patients with nutritional problems.”
Dr. Adam Gaffney, a critical care physician and assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, said he supports schools expanding their nutrition courses, thinking the new findings are “scientifically sound.”
However, he said, Kennedy’s premise was that “doctors don’t know, don’t care if they talk about healthy food, so they just push pills.”
“That premise is wrong. It also misidentifies the problem,” Gaffney said. “Americans tend to eat unhealthy foods because of financial and time constraints and because unhealthy foods are available everywhere and are easy and cheap.”
Gaffney also said that Kennedy has embraced many “false scientific” medical theories, from substituting seed oil for beef, claiming it’s a healthier option, to minimizing the role of vaccines in public health, emphasizing unsubstantiated claims that guns are linked to autism.
That “raises questions about what exactly they want to see added to existing health education in medical schools,” Gaffney said.
