Food Is Medicine: Nutrition Education and Its Transformational Potential for Medical Practice

Abstract

Collectively, diet-driven chronic diseases account for 7 out of 10 deaths in the U.S. However, nutrition accounts for less than 1% of educational time in medical school, and consequently 23 only 14% of practicing physicians feel qualified to offer nutritional advice to their patients. I hypothesize that a stronger focus on nutrition in medical training would catalyze a shift in medical practice to better tackle poor diet, reducing health disparities and improving population health. To this end my scholarly project explores nutrition education and its transformational potential by 1) analyzing the policy opportunities to promote nutrition education for all U.S. medical trainees and advocating to realize them 2) supporting nutrition education curriculum development at HMS 3) developing of an informed view on the future of nutrition-enabled medical training and practice.