The announcement from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), with the support of the U.S. Department of Education, is seen as an important part of RFK, Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again agenda, which prioritizes prevention and reducing chronic disease through improved diet and public health measures.
“Medical schools talk about nutrition but fail to teach it,” said Secretary Kennedy in a statement. “We demand immediate, measurable reforms to embed nutrition education across every stage of medical training, hold institutions accountable for progress and equip every future physician with the tools to prevent disease—not just treat it.”
Secretary Kennedy outlined his position in an editorial in The Wall Street Journal.
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The stats
A paper published in November 2024 in Advances in Nutrition and cited in the HHS announcement explores the major deficits in nutrition education that currently exist and opportunities to address them to improve future medical student and physician training in nutrition care.
Sundar Krishnan, Trevor Sytsma and Paul Wischmeyer from Duke University School of Medicine noted that only 29% of U.S. medical schools met the recommended minimum 25 hours of nutrition education, and only 14% of residency programs have a required nutrition curriculum (data from 2018 survey).
In addition, 75% of U.S. medical schools have no required specific clinical nutrition classes in their curricula, the paper stated.
“More concerning, among subspecialists caring for diseases clearly impacted by nutrition, 90% reported receiving no or minimal nutrition education during fellowship training, and 59% reported no nutrition education during residency,” the authors wrote. “Similarly, based on a survey of faculty, fellows and medical residents at Langone Health-New York University, only 14% of healthcare providers felt comfortable discussing nutrition with their patients.”
An urgent need
Paul Wischmeyer, MD, professor of anesthesiology and surgery at Duke University School of Medicine and co-author of the paper, told NutraIngredients that he received no nutrition training at all in medical school.
“At University of Colorado, where I was a professor before being at Duke for last nine years, I taught the only two hours of clinical nutrition the students received in all four years of medical school,” he said.
To address this urgent need in medical education, Dr. Wischmeyer and collaborators at Duke successfully initiated the “Duke Clinical Nutrition Course and Fellowship”, an online education program created to address this major gap in clinical nutrition education.
“To date, we have trained over 250 trainees, primarily comprising physicians, as well as several dietitians and APPs,” he said. “Approximately half have been U.S. physicians, with the other half comprising physicians from underserved and developing nations worldwide. This includes trainees from over 49 countries.”
“We are seeing an incredible increase in interest in physicians in nutrition training as shown by the many MDs we are training in clinical nutrition in our Duke Clinical Nutrition Fellowship in the US and worldwide,” he added.
“We have 51 fellows this year in our class of 2025, and we already have over 75 physicians who have already applied to our program or asked to apply, and we have not even officially announced that enrollment is open or begun to advertise for people to apply yet (we will officially request applications in the fall). Thus, we are seeing an overwhelming and incredible growth in interest in nutrition education amongst MDs.”
“Poor diet fuels more than 500,000 preventable deaths annually from heart disease, stroke and diabetes. The science is indisputable, and the void is clear. But the medical profession has been reluctant to fill it.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in The Wall Street Journal.
The Duke Clinical Nutrition Course and Fellowship is one example of what can be achieved, and Secretaries Kennedy (HHS) and McMahon (DOE) are now calling for increased nutrition education requirements to be embedded across the six critical areas, which include pre-medical standards, medical school curricula integration, medical licensing examination, residency requirements, board certification and continuing education.
“U.S. medical education has not kept up with the overwhelming research on the role of nutrition in preventing and treating chronic diseases,” stated Secretary Linda McMahon. “Medical schools across the country must act now to align their training with the latest research so that future physicians have the means to best help their patients stay healthy.”
HHS has directed U.S. medical education organizations to submit written plans by Sept. 10 detailing the scope, timeline, standards alignment, measurable milestones and accountability measures of their nutrition education commitments.
An imbalanced evidence base
Jeff Chen is CEO & Cofounder of Radicle Science. An MD who graduated from UCLA, Dr. Chen told us that he received little formal nutrition education during his training. “This omission affects clinicians and patients alike: research shows physicians often have below average diets for their socioeconomic status, and they have low confidence counseling patients on nutrition.
“It’s not for lack of will or caring; a root cause of this is an imbalanced evidence base,” he added. “Decades of heavy research investment in pharmaceuticals naturally pull evidence-based clinicians toward drugs. Nutrition and supplement research has been underfunded and is often observational—leading to confounding and inconclusive results. Moreover, no one is average and we need to understand the appropriate solution for each type of person.”
Dr. Chen said HHS’s push to embed nutrition across healthcare training is “needed and overdue”, and proposed a twofold fix to the problem: “Expand nutrition in the curriculum—for trainees’ and patients’ wellbeing—and invest in randomized, real-world trials of nutrition and supplement interventions on large diverse populations. These trials can be dramatically aided by AI, decentralized designs, digital biomarkers, and citizen science to finally generate rigorous evidence with precision health insights into subpopulation effects--without pharma-sized budgets.”
NPA: “A ‘radical’ and ‘commonsense’ approach”
Daniel Fabricant, PhD, president and CEO of the Natural Products Association (NPA), applauded the announcement, which he called a “historic step to prioritize nutrition education throughout the medical training pipeline.”
“For too long, our healthcare system has focused its efforts on the treatment of disease and undervalued prevention and the role of ‘food as medicine’, or nutrition in achieving healthier outcomes,” he told NI.
“By ensuring that future physicians are equipped with the knowledge to counsel patients on a healthy diet, which may include supplementation, HHS is aligning with what consumers already know: Better nutrition means better health.
“This initiative is not only a strong complement to the ‘Make America Healthy Again’ movement, but as HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said, it represents a ‘radical’ and ‘commonsense’ approach to the education of the medical establishment,” Dr. Fabricant added. “NPA looks forward to working with HHS and the Trump administration to advance a more preventive model of care that makes Americans healthier and reduces billions of dollars in costs.”
CRN: ‘Poor diets are not without consequence’
Steve Mister, president and CEO of the Council for Responsible Nutrition, said that his organization has been calling on schools of medicine, pharmacy and dietetics to acknowledge the relationship between nutrition and better health as well as a proper role for dietary supplements.
“Poor diets are not without consequence,” he said. “It’s encouraging to hear the administration sound similar alarms that healthcare providers should get this training before they are certified to practice.”
“Too often, patients are greeted with comments like ‘I guess it won’t hurt you’, ‘I don’t really know much about vitamins’, or ‘Let’s put you on a pharmaceutical to correct the problem’,” Mister added. “These are not satisfactory answers but are borne out of a lack of understanding of the well-researched beneficial role supplements can play. Lack of knowledge shuts down these conversations rather than promoting them. We can do better.”
CHPA calls for whole-of-society approach
Duffy MacKay, SVP of Dietary Supplements for the Consumer Healthcare Products Association (CHPA), told NutraIngredients: “Improving nutrition education for physicians is important at any level of their career, but a strategy should also include strengthening, supporting, and expanding access to dietitians and nutritionists, while also investing in nutrition literacy for all Americans. Healthy progress requires a whole-of-society approach with investments and incentives for all.”
