Medical educators are responding to the call from Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to better incorporate nutrition-based medical education into their curricula, a pillar of his Make America Healthy Again agenda.
The Association of American Medical Colleges, the largest nonprofit association representing medical educators, on Thursday called upon the deans and faculty members of medical schools across the country to evaluate their institutions’ current practices on nutrition education and identify more opportunities to integrate nutrition into their curricula.
The call from AAMC came as part of the organization’s commitment to Kennedy, following his request in August that educators in medical schools, as well as pre-med undergraduate programs, better prepare tomorrow’s physicians and nurses for holistic wellness and chronic disease prevention through a balanced diet.
AAMC, which represents all 160 United States medical schools and nearly 500 academic health systems and teaching hospitals, provides medical educators with best practices and various resources to help with designing curricula and standards on all issues necessary to train the next generation of medical professionals, including nutrition.
Dr. Alison Whelan, the association’s Chief Academic Officer, told the Washington Examiner that Thursday’s announcement is a “continuation and expansion” of what her organization has been doing over the past decade.
She said that the organization has “had a very active connection with our schools in trying to advance, help them advance their nutrition education,” but Kennedy’s call to action served as another opportunity to improve visibility about those efforts.
“We realized that this was an opportunity to let people know how much actually was going on in nutrition education, and that the continued efforts that were going on,” Whelan said.
AAMC’s data snapshot on medical education from earlier this year found that, although all of the medical schools in the association incorporate nutrition education to some degree in their curricula, only 82% report requiring a nutrition class.
Fewer than half of schools reported that nutrition-based content was included in multiple courses or rotations, and only 17% said it was fully integrated across all years or phases of their curriculum.
Additionally, Kennedy cited separate data in August that only 25% of medical school graduates report feeling confident in advising their patients on nutrition information. Despite this, most preventable chronic diseases, such as heart disease and Type 2 diabetes, can be mitigated through diet and lifestyle changes.
Whelan said that each medical school institution has a great degree of flexibility in how it designs and administers its programs, but AAMC assists educators by providing evidence-based resources.
AAMC’s Thursday announcement included the streamlining of resources for medical educators to revamp nutrition curricula, including centralizing information in their MedEdPORTAL, which is accessible to medical school faculty and leadership.
Medical school accreditation through the Liaison Committee on Medical Education is also in the process of being amended, pending a vote in February, to require schools to sufficiently teach about the “role of nutrition in prevention and management of chronic disease.
AAMC’s call to action for medical educators does not, however, reference any changes to the MCAT exam for medical school entrance, which AAMC administers.
Kennedy’s call to action in August also referenced the need to improve the integration of a “food is medicine” approach in undergraduate medical programs and to require nutrition testing on the MCAT exam.
The MCAT is a seven-hour-long exam process that tests college-level knowledge of basic bioscience concepts as well as psychology and sociology. Although the exam’s 10 foundational concepts include understanding social structures, demography, and social inequality, the exam does not have an explicit category on how diet and macronutrients affect health.
When asked about changing the MCAT exam, Whelan said that the exam is “always under review and always being looked at” as a metric of academic readiness for medical school.
