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Over 50 U.S. medical schools will begin requiring coursework in nutrition education, after voluntarily joining a $5 million initiative championed by U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. this week.
Several doctors said the initiative will strengthen an area of medical education that was previously lacking.
“This initiative addresses a national gap in medical education,” said Stephanie Fleming, director of communications for the University of Missouri School of Medicine.
“Physicians have historically received very little formal training in nutrition,” Fleming told The Defender. “Nutrition education gives future physicians evidence-based tools to prevent and manage many of the most common chronic illnesses.”
As part of the initiative, announced Thursday, participating institutions have agreed to offer at least 40 hours of nutrition education, or a 40-hour competency equivalent, beginning in the 2026-27 academic year.
Schools may construct their curriculum based on a list of 71 core nutrition competencies developed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)
Kennedy said the initiative will help address the chronic disease epidemic in the U.S.
“Chronic disease is bankrupting our health system, and poor nutrition sits at the center of that crisis,” Kennedy said in a statement. “Today medical schools are committing to change how America trains its doctors — by putting nutrition back where it belongs: at the heart of patient care.”
As of Thursday, 53 medical schools in 31 states had agreed to participate.
Initiative tackles ‘preventable disease crisis’
Family medicine physician Dr. George Fareed said the initiative will improve Americans’ health.
“It will have only positive benefits for Americans’ health in the future. Nutrition is key to longevity and wellness. Doctors will be better prepared to educate their patients on proper nutrition,” Fareed said.
HHS cited data showing that the U.S. spends $4.4 trillion annually to treat chronic disease and mental health and that 1 million Americans die from food-related chronic illnesses each year. HHS described this as a “preventable disease crisis.”
Tackling the chronic disease epidemic and improving Americans’ nutrition is a key tenet of Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) agenda. A September 2025 report by the White House’s MAHA Commission called for increased nutrition education.
In January, Kennedy unveiled new national dietary guidelines, inverting the “food pyramid” developed in the 1990s by putting protein, dairy, healthy fats, vegetables and fruit at the top and grains at the bottom.
“Between the revision of the food pyramid and this initiative, my hope is that our children will not only flourish, but we will also be able to reverse decades of bad nutrition and the epidemic of chronic diseases,” said family medicine physician Dr. Kat Lindley.
‘Two full years of pharmacology, and only one class in nutrition’
According to the HHS fact sheet, “foundational competencies” of the nutrition curriculum that medical schools will develop include the identification of nutrient-deficient states and the development of healthy lifelong dietary patterns for chronic disease patients.
Several physicians and medical professionals who spoke with The Defender said the nutrition curriculum is a welcome departure from the nutrition education most medical schools currently offer or that they received during their studies — even though some medical schools state on their websites that “food is medicine.”
“Food is medicine, but instead, all we learned in medical school was how to identify symptoms and figure out which drug to go with it,” said Dr. Margaret Christensen, a trained gynecologist, national and international clinical educator and co-founder of the Carpathia Collaborative.
“We had many hours and two full years of pharmacology, and only one class in nutrition,” Christensen said.
Fareed, who attended Harvard Medical School between 1966-70, said he received “no formal nutrition education or training.”
Retired gastroenterologist Dr. Danice Hertz said, “An education in nutrition has been conspicuously lacking from American medical schools as well as residency programs. This has a negative impact on disease prevention, as many chronic diseases can be controlled and even eliminated with proper nutrition.”
Hertz said her medical school training included “minimal education in nutrition.”
“I was not prepared to assess and treat nutritional issues or to counsel patients regarding disease prevention through good nutrition. What I learned about nutrition was self-taught,” Hertz said.
Internal medicine physician Dr. Clayton J. Baker said he received “about 10 to 20 hours of nutrition instruction in medical school.” Nutrition education “was not completely ignored,” but it also was “not emphasized,” he said.
Baker said a significant portion of this limited nutrition training was based on the previous “food pyramid.” When introducing the new national dietary guidelines in January, Kennedy said the previous model “wrongly discouraged” healthy fats and proteins and overemphasized grains.
“When I was in medical school, I was taught the current mainstream doctrine at the time, including the ‘food pyramid.’ That approach to nutrition turned out to be counterproductive to good health,” Baker said.
Dr. Jane Orient, executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, said her medical education included material on “vitamins, carbohydrates, proteins, fats, and minerals, and signs of excesses and deficiencies.”
“If we learned about a balanced diet, we learned about the now-discredited food pyramid,” Orient said.
Clinical nutritionist Gail Clayton, who teaches biochemistry of nutrition at the University of Bridgeport, said nutrition education has also been lacking at pharmacy schools.
“We weren’t taught the function of the metabolic pathways,” Clayton said. “Our current system just throws a drug treatment without looking for any underlying nutrient deficiency or imbalance.”
Pharma ‘skewed the curricula of America’s top medical schools’
Some physicians identified caveats with the new initiative. They noted recent Trump administration policies and raised questions about what the newly introduced nutrition education will replace in medical schools’ curriculum.
Baker said that while the initiative is “overdue,” there are questions about “the recent decisions by the administration regarding pesticides.”
Last month, President Donald Trump signed an executive order calling for the increased domestic production of glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup weedkiller — and a suspected carcinogen.
“One wonders how meaningful improved nutrition education will prove to be in the U.S. A balanced diet of whole foods is of limited value if it is drenched in glyphosate,” Baker said.
Orient said there is “no evidence” that 40 hours of nutrition education “will have any effect on disease rates” and questioned what these hours would be subtracted from.
“The number of hours is not important, content is,” Orient said. “We have a lot of chronic disease. A nutrition course is not likely to include iatrogenic causes, such as vaccines and drugs — including prescription drugs, and other lifestyle factors, such as lack of sunshine, exercise and healthy relationships.”
Dr. Joseph Varon, president and chief medical officer of the Independent Medical Alliance, said the initiative is a “good first step” that returns medical schools’ focus to “science and data.”
“Industry influence, particularly from the deep-pocketed pharmaceutical industry, has skewed the curricula of America’s top medical schools,” Varon said. “If we are serious about reversing chronic disease, nutrition must become a core part of medical training.”
Several studies and surveys — some dating back to the 1960s — have found that most medical schools do not emphasize nutrition education, with three-fourths of U.S. medical schools not requiring clinical nutrition courses and only 14% of residency programs offering a required nutrition curriculum.
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, while a 2015 survey found that U.S. medical students spent, on average, 19 hours on nutrition education over their four years of medical school.
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Initiative one of several Kennedy-led efforts to improve U.S. nutrition
The new initiative comes amid an ongoing push by Kennedy to promote better nutrition in the U.S., including visits to school cafeterias as part of a recent “Take Back Your Health” tour.
In an interview with Joe Rogan earlier this month — during which Kennedy was critical of glyphosate — Kennedy said a federal definition of ultraprocessed foods will be announced as soon as April.
Earlier this month, Kennedy also announced a plan to “teach people to cook” and took aim at two coffee chains — Starbucks and Dunkin’ — over the high sugar content in some of their coffee-based beverages.
Related articles in The Defender
- RFK Jr. Flips the Food Pyramid
- MAHA Commission Outlines Sweeping Agenda to Target Chronic Disease
- RFK Jr.: MAHA Report a ‘Clarion Call’ to End the Chronic Disease Epidemic
- ‘We’ve Addicted Our Farmers’ to Glyphosate, RFK Jr. Tells Joe Rogan
- Trump Directs USDA to Make More Glyphosate, Signals Liability Protection for Pesticide Makers
- ‘Always Listen to the Mom’: U.S. to Phase Out Artificial Dyes Used in Food Products
