From periphery to curriculum: Considering higher education in dietary supplements

The new offering responds to industry workforce demand while reflecting broader changes in how healthcare professionals think about nutrition and natural products, said David Colby, PhD, director of online graduate programs for biomolecular sciences at the University of Mississippi.

“The healthcare professional is the number one source of information for dietary supplements in the United States,” he noted. “For the most part, pharmacists are well-trained and knowledgeable in dietary supplements. Medical doctors have to learn more about diagnosis and prognosis rather than really being experts on these products.”

Taught through the school of pharmacy, the two-year degree program offers courses on supplement phytochemistry, pharmacology, toxicology and regulatory frameworks and has attracted applicants from the pharmaceutical, health and wellness and cannabis industries. The university also offers students a graduate certificate in dietary supplements, which can be applied towards the master’s program.

A professional gap

Robust nutrition and supplement education is limited if not absent from traditional medical school curricula, a lesson naturopathic medical doctor Josh Redd discovered when applying to colleges.

“I ended up going to chiropractic school because they teach just a lot more nutrition than what they would in medical school,” he said.

During his studies, Dr. Redd took courses in nutrition and botanical medicine, learning about mechanisms of action and root causes, before earning a master’s in public health biology from Johns Hopkins University. As a result, protocols at his RedRiver Health and Wellness clinics, which operate in Utah, Idaho, Nevada and New Mexico, include evaluating patients for deficiencies and prescribing botanicals and supplements to correct them.

“If conventional doctors were also trained in botanical medicine, you would have the best of both worlds at your fingertips, and that’s where I’m at right now,” Dr. Redd said. “I have a background in functional and botanical medicine where if somebody comes to me, I have 20 different things that I can do to help them improve different imbalances.”

Historically, medical training has focused primarily on diagnosing and treating disease through pharmacology, procedures and acute clinical care, said Vivek Lal, MD, CEO of biotics supplement company Resbiotic. Because of this, areas like nutrition, microbiome biology and nutritional therapeutics have received relatively limited attention in the traditional medical curriculum.

“Part of the reason is structural,” Dr. Lal noted. “Pharmaceutical therapies follow clear regulatory and clinical trial pathways, which has naturally integrated them into clinical guidelines and medical education. By contrast, nutrition and microbiome science involve complex, systems-level interactions that have historically been more difficult to study with traditional clinical trial models.”

That is beginning to change. Advances in microbiome sequencing, metabolomic and systems biology are helping to better understand how diet, microbial metabolites and host–microbe signaling influence metabolic, immune and endocrine pathways.

“As that evidence base grows, these areas are increasingly being recognized as important components of how we understand and support human physiology, alongside traditional medical therapies,” Dr. Lal said.

Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the U.S. Department of Education announced commitments from 53 U.S. medical schools to provide 40-hour competency training in nutrition for future doctors beginning in the fall of 2026. Some of this training provides coursework on supplement use.

“Medical schools talk about nutrition but fail to teach it,” said Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. 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.”

Supplements can play an important role in clinician education programs when they are presented within a broader framework of physiology and systems biology, Dr. Lal said.

“Rather than being viewed only as tools for addressing symptoms such as gastrointestinal discomfort or stress, nutritional interventions can also be discussed as ways to support underlying biological resilience, including gut ecosystem balance, metabolic signaling and immune regulation.”

As this area continues to grow, clinician education should also place greater emphasis on helping providers critically evaluate the supplement landscape, he added. This includes understanding how to assess ingredient quality, dosing rationale and the difference between formulations supported by mechanistic or clinical research versus those driven primarily by marketing or social media visibility.

New programs based on old traditions

While some universities are catching up to nutrition and supplement education, other colleges have the historical foundations to substantially integrate that new coursework.

The University of Mississippi program draws on its vast expertise in both medical cannabis and dietary supplements, as the school of pharmacy houses the National Center for Natural Products Research (NCNPR)—a pioneer in dietary supplement research—and the National Center for Cannabis Education and Research (NCCRE).

It is also home to the NCNPR’s annual International Conference on the Science of Botanicals (ICSB), which brings together academia, industry and experts from government agencies such as the FDA, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the National Institutes of Health to discuss medicinal and aromatic plants. That decades-long convergence, as well as a long history focused on pharmacognosy (the study of botany for medicine), helped to inform the master’s degree program.

“That expertise [in pharmacognosy] is historically in all the pharmacy schools across the country, and ours is certainly no different,” Dr. Colby said.

The difference is that as modern medicine advanced, many pharmacy schools phased out herbalists and pharmacognosy programs whereas the University of Mississippi decided to build on that knowledge.

Essentially part of a bigger, more diversified degree program, Johns Hopkins University instituted a 14-week Regulation of Dietary Supplements course in the summer of 2025 and now being offered as a 15-week course in spring 2026. It introduces students to definitions and the jurisdiction of supplements in the United States and abroad as they learn about the history of dietary supplement use, regulations such as the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994, good manufacturing practices, GRAS, safety and toxicology considerations, and the New Dietary Ingredient Notification program, as examples.

“My curriculum is really focused on helping students get a hands-on experience on understanding what supplements are, how they are regulated and the scientific basis for the regulation,” said Dr. Kantha Shelke, PhD, who teaches the course.

She added that her students represent a range of disciplines, from public health to pharmacy. Some work at companies like Pepsi, Mars and General Mills.

“For other students who come from the biotech or from the drug sector, they often assume that dietary supplements are the Wild West and everything is fake,” she said. “They were stunned with how much they learned about the amount of scientific evidence that goes behind supplements.”

Dr. William Barrier, PhD, program director for the business and regulatory division of the university’s Center for Biotechnology Education which houses the supplement regulatory coursework, said the center has not yet contacted supplement companies to participate in the curriculum since the course is new but that it is exploring the possibility.

“It’s not a directly consumer facing course,” he said. “So from the standpoint of it educating Joe Public, it doesn’t really do that, but hopefully you’re educating the people who are involved in the manufacturing or selling of these items, as well as the marketing folks or the scientists.”

For Dr. Shelke, the greatest challenge teaching the course is the sheer breadth and nuance of the regulatory topic, as supplements occupy a unique regulatory space.

“It is fundamentally different from both conventional foods and from drugs—so understanding that requires integration of food science, nutrition, pharmacology, law, public health, et cetera, against the backdrop of what consumers want from their food and supplements,” she said. “The students don’t come from that. They either come from one or the other, so as a teacher, you’ve got to be able to pull all of that together and then provide it in the context of the regulatory framework.”