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The Trump administration will encourage medical schools to include nutrition in their curriculum.
When Covid-19 struck, the U.S. healthcare system proved it could move with extraordinary speed. In the spring of 2020, telehealth visits surged 154% compared with the year before. What had been a niche service became nearly universal in weeks. That rapid pivot showed us a truth too often ignored: When we recognize a crisis, the medical sector can adapt overnight.
Yet our system refuses to show the same urgency in confronting a far greater, longer-running crisis: the chronic-disease epidemic.
Heart disease, diabetes, obesity and other diet-related illnesses kill 7 out of 10 Americans and consume nearly 90% of a healthcare budget that’s more than $4 trillion a year. Unlike Covid, this epidemic has been accumulating over decades, hollowing out the health of our people year after year.
At the root of this crisis is nutrition. 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. A 2022 survey in the Journal of Wellness found that medical students receive on average a mere 1.2 hours of formal nutrition education per year. Even among those specifically pursuing a degree in nutritional education, the figure is a paltry 2.9 hours a year. Three-fourths of U.S. medical schools have no required clinical nutrition classes, and only 14% of residency programs have a required nutrition curriculum.
Accrediting bodies and medical organizations look the other way, declining to set clear requirements. We train physicians to wield the latest surgical tools, but not to guide patients on how to stay out of the operating room in the first place. We know that when applied properly, nutrition counseling can prevent and even reverse chronic disease.
Future physicians must graduate prepared to prevent disease—by assessing risk, guiding lifestyle change, providing nutritional counseling, educating patients and addressing environmental factors, with nutrition education as the most proven and powerful tool. With the support of Education Secretary Linda McMahon, I am calling on medical schools, residency programs, licensing boards, and assessment and accrediting bodies to overhaul their standards. They must embed rigorous, measurable nutrition education at every stage of medical training.
Medical education organizations and accreditors should implement robust and meaningful nutrition competency requirements across the entire medical training continuum. Change starts with prerequisites for premed students and nutrition testing on the MCAT. Accreditors must then establish new standards for preclinical nutrition education, more hours of clinical nutrition training during clerkships, and specialty-specific nutrition requirements across all residency programs.
Finally, these organizations must modify their assessment frameworks by increasing nutrition content on licensing board examinations and continuing education and training. We expect public commitments from each organization to make a priority of nutrition education, establish competency-based evaluation tools, and create sustainable faculty-development programs to support these enhanced standards. These are reasonable, science-based reforms with countless peer-reviewed articles to back them up.
The chronic disease epidemic is the most urgent and costly health crisis in America today. We can’t afford another decade of delay. Reforming medical education to put nutrition at its core will equip the next generation of doctors with the tools to restore the health of our nation— to make America healthy again.
Mr. Kennedy is secretary of health and human services.