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The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) announced today a “call to action” for American medical schools to “strengthen nutrition education across all stages of the medical education continuum.”
“Nutrition is central to preventing, managing, and treating many of the chronic diseases that continue to drive morbidity, mortality, and health care costs in the United States,” AAMC President and CEO David J. Skorton, M.D., said in a press release statement.
“Physicians must be adequately prepared with the necessary competencies to address their patients’ nutrition-related health needs in collaboration with other health professionals, including dietitians, nutritionists, nurses, occupational therapists, and public health professionals,” Skorton added. “Medical education has an essential role to play in advancing awareness and training in nutrition.”
The AAMC is urging deans and medical education officials at its member medical schools “to evaluate their institutions’ current practices and identify, if needed, additional opportunities to further integrate nutrition education within their curricula.”
The statement references the announcement, made in late August by U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and U.S. Department of Education Secretary Linda McMahon, of their intention to strengthen nutrition training during every stage of medical education.
AAMC responded in September with its own letter of support for the nutrition education initiative, though it asserted to the secretaries that “it has been engaged in strategic efforts to improve nutrition education for many years” via an effort “grounded in competency-based medical education.”
“The AAMC strongly supports flexibility in the ability of its member medical schools to integrate comprehensive evidence-based curricular content on nutrition across all stages of medical education in alignment with their unique missions and accreditation standards,” Skorton said in AAMC’s statement today.
According to AAMC, its members are “all 160 U.S. medical schools accredited by the Liaison Committee on Medical Education; 13 Canadian medical schools accredited by the Committee on Accreditation of Canadian Medical Schools; nearly 500 academic health systems and teaching hospitals, including Department of Veterans Affairs medical centers; and more than 70 academic societies.”
Along with the American Medical Association (AMA), AAMC sponsors the Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME), which ultimately has, as AAMC notes, “final authority for the adoption of new or revised accreditation standards or policies” for medical schools.
LCME acts independently in its “evaluations of medical education programs” and their accreditation status, AAMC adds.
Kennedy’s August announcement of a “bold reform” of overhauling medical education to include required nutrition courses has been another significant piece of the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) initiative.
In his video message to Americans, the secretary referenced “the woeful lack of nutrition education in medicine,” noting that “poor diet drives America’s chronic disease crisis, fueling seven of our 10 deadliest conditions.”
Poor nutrition, Kennedy continued, “claims an estimated one million American lives through diet-related illnesses” each year.
“Meanwhile, we pour more than $4 trillion annually into treating these preventable diseases, and we continue to graduate physicians unprepared to confront their root cause,” he lamented, pointing out “a critical disconnect” in the mission to eliminate chronic disease.
“Although all medical schools claim to include nutrition in their curricula, most medical students report receiving no formal nutrition education throughout their entire training,” Kennedy said. “This leads to a troubling reality.”
“We can reverse the chronic disease epidemic simply by changing our diets and lifestyles,” he observed. “But to do that, we need nutrition to be a basic part of every doctor’s training. We’ll start by embedding nutrition directly into college pre-med programs and testing it on the MCAT. Every future physician should master the language of prevention before they even touch a stethoscope.”
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