There and Back Again: A Forty-Year Perspective on Physician Nutrition Education

Jaclyn Lewis Albin; Olivia W Thomas; Farshad Fani Marvasti; Jo Marie Reilly

doi:10.1016/j.advnut.2024.100230

There and Back Again: A Forty-Year Perspective on Physician Nutrition Education

Adv Nutr. 2024 Apr 24:100230. doi: 10.1016/j.advnut.2024.100230. Online ahead of print.

Authors

Jaclyn Lewis Albin¹, Olivia W Thomas², Farshad Fani Marvasti³, Jo Marie Reilly⁴

Affiliations

¹ Departments of Internal Medicine and Pediatrics, the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, TX, United States. Electronic address: Jaclyn.albin@utsouthwestern.edu.
² Boston Medical Center, Boston, MA, United States.
³ Department of Family, Community, and Preventive Medicine, University of Arizona College of Medicine-Phoenix and School of Nutritional Sciences and Wellness, College of Agricultural, Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, United States.
⁴ Clinical Family Medicine and Population and Public Health, Keck School of Medicine of University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, United States.

PMID: 38705195
DOI: 10.1016/j.advnut.2024.100230

Abstract

Medical education faces an urgent need for evidence-based physician nutrition education. Since the publication of the 1985 National Academies report "Nutrition Education in the United States Medical Schools," little has changed. Although several key efforts sought to increase nutrition content in undergraduate medical education over the past 40 y, most medical schools still fail to include the recommended minimum of 25 h of nutrition training. Without foundational concepts of nutrition in undergraduate medical education, graduate medical education unsurprisingly falls short of meeting patient needs for nutritional guidance in clinical practice. Meanwhile, diet-sensitive chronic diseases continue to escalate, although largely preventable and treatable by nutritional therapies and dietary lifestyle changes. Fortunately, recent recognition and adoption of Food is Medicine programs across the country increasingly connect patients with healthy food resources and nutrition education as core to their medical care, and physicians must be equipped to lead these efforts alongside their dietitian colleagues. Filling the gap in nutrition training will require an innovative and interprofessional approach that pairs nutrition with personal wellness, interprofessional practice, and community service learning. The intersectional benefits of connecting these domains will help prepare future physicians to address the social, behavioral, and lifestyle determinants of health in a way that recognizes nourishing food access as a core part of clinical practice. There are numerous strategies to integrate nutrition into education pathways, including didactic and experiential learning. Culinary medicine, an evidence-based field combining the culinary arts with nutritional science and medicine, is 1 promising educational framework with a hands-on, interprofessional approach that emphasizes community engagement. Advancing the critical need for widespread adoption of nutrition education for physicians will require support and engagement across societal stakeholders, including co-leadership from registered dietitian nutritionists, health system and payor reform, and opportunities for clinical innovation that bring this essential field to frontline patient care.

Keywords: culinary medicine; diet-sensitive disease; graduate medical education; interprofessional; nutrition education; undergraduate medical education.