Excerpt
Every day, patients walk into clinics with diseases that, unbeknownst to them, stem from what’s on their dinner table — yet most doctors are ill-equipped to counsel them. That’s not for lack of care or effort, but for lack of training.
As a research scientist specializing in nutrition and a professor preparing future physicians, I know the uphill battle it is to get medical schools to embrace one of the most powerful tools for tackling chronic disease: evidence-based dietary interventions.
Today, most medical students receive fewer than 20 hours of nutrition training over four years of school — far short of the modest 25-hour minimum recommended decades ago. And much of that instruction is outdated. Medical education largely overlooks the latest science on metabolic health — how efficiently the body converts food into energy and keeps blood sugar in balance — to the detriment of both doctors and patients.
Poor diet is now estimated to be the nation’s leading cause of mortality, driving epidemics of obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular illness.
That has to change.
At the University of South Florida’s Morsani College of Medicine, we’ve challenged the conventional approach to medical education. Nearly a decade ago, our students asked for stronger nutrition training after realizing how many of their patients were suffering from diet-related conditions. They spent years urging faculty to make nutrition a required part of their medical education. Faculty and administrators listened.