Under pressure from Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., dozens of American medical schools have agreed to rework their curriculums to teach more about nutrition, according to federal officials, records and interviews with medical leaders.
Mr. Kennedy, who has made healthy eating a centerpiece of his campaign to address what he calls an epidemic of chronic disease, has spent months pressuring medical schools to adopt his ideas, threatening funding cuts and promising public recognition.
He is expected to announce this week that many schools are embracing his recommendations — a development that has disturbed some academic and medical leaders who had already been alarmed by the Trump administration’s quest to remake higher education.
Mr. Kennedy’s effort draws on decades of debate about how much America’s doctors should know about nutrition. Many experts in the field have long argued that schools do not teach enough on the topic. But in shaping the new curriculum, the secretary has also tapped into voices and ideas from the Make America Healthy Again movement that sometimes deviate from established science.
“When I first came in I met with the medical schools and I said, ‘We want you to start teaching 40 hours of nutrition,’ ” Mr. Kennedy told his supporters last week at a MAHA rally in Austin, Texas, previewing the initiative before the formal announcement. “We actually developed a curriculum that’s extraordinary. We said, you don’t have to use that. Use whatever you want, teach whatever you want, but you need to teach nutrition.”
Doctors themselves have been arguing for decades that medical schools should include more training in nutrition. In 1962, for instance, the American Medical Association held a conference on the matter, after a report by the group concluded that there was “inadequate recognition, support, and attention given to this subject in medical schools.”
“Nothing much has budged since then,” said Marion Nestle, an emeritus professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University. Medical schools do offer some instruction in the subject, but a survey published in 2015 estimated that only 29 percent of institutions had provided at least 25 hours on the subject over four years of medical school, as has been recommended by the National Research Council. Some schools have added more nutrition coursework, Dr. Nestle said, but there has not been nationwide progress.
Mr. Kennedy’s proposed curriculum includes a wide range of nutrition skills, many of which are mainstream. Others echo ideas from the field of functional medicine, which tends to use testing, monitoring and dietary supplements to find and treat the “root cause” of symptoms. Some of Mr. Kennedy’s recommended “competencies,” such as the suggestion that doctors learn about crops and composting, have invited skepticism.
The recommended curriculum draws heavily on the work of Dr. Casey Means, President Trump’s nominee for surgeon general, and her brother, Calley, a close adviser to Mr. Kennedy. The secretary said in his speech in Austin that his team had met with accreditors and the groups behind the U.S. Medical Licensing Exam, as well as 100 medical schools.
A spokesman for Mr. Kennedy, Andrew Nixon, did not answer questions about how the curriculum framework had been developed, but said, “We look forward to announcing the commitments of dozens of leading medical schools to require meaningful nutrition training for future doctors later this week.”
There are more than 160 medical schools in the United States, and it is unclear how many will adopt Mr. Kennedy’s ideas or how those that do so will incorporate them.
In 2022, a bipartisan resolution in the House and the Biden administration both called for medical schools and other health training programs to expand nutrition education. Dr. Angela Dearinger, the executive vice dean of the University of Kentucky College of Medicine, welcomed Mr. Kennedy’s push, noting that the school had not been asked to include any particular content.
“I think that putting an emphasis on nutrition in medical education is important,” Dr. Dearinger said. But she added that Kentucky would “do this through the lens of evidence-based education, just like we do with everything.”
The fact that some are backing Mr. Kennedy’s approach is significant since many in academia have balked at the Trump administration’s efforts to bend higher education to its agenda.
Universities have traditionally guarded their independence over instruction, and some in academia worry that accepting the recommendations of Mr. Kennedy, a lawyer, opens the way for sustained government interference. Speaking in Austin, Mr. Kennedy acknowledged the wariness of some medical schools, noting that “some of them didn’t want it because they said it’s a Trump program.”
Dr. Daniel Jones, a former University of Mississippi chancellor who also led the medical school there, and generally supports the idea of additional teaching about nutrition, described federal pressure about curriculum as “a dangerous thing to education broadly, and particularly medical education.”
Dr. Louis Sullivan, who oversaw changes to nutrition labeling when he was President George Bush’s health secretary, said that he was “not surprised but disappointed” by Mr. Kennedy’s tactics.
“As long as the school is using information they think is scientifically valid and nutritionally appropriate, that’s fine,” said Dr. Sullivan, who was also president of the Morehouse School of Medicine. But, he said, “It certainly should not be a situation where schools are surrendering to the government.”
By Mr. Kennedy’s own account, he and his aides wore down schools over months.
Last April, in an appearance in Charlotte, N.C., Mr. Kennedy complained about inadequate nutrition education in medical schools and referred to federal funding as “leverage.”
Within a year, he said, the government would announce that medical schools offering too little teaching about nutrition were “not going to be eligible for our funding.”
In August, Mr. Kennedy and Education Secretary Linda McMahon pressed medical education groups to strengthen the nutrition curriculum. But the officials encountered resistance, and in January Mr. Kennedy tried a softer approach.
The Department of Health and Human Services, he wrote in a letter to university leaders, “welcomes your participation to implement” at least 40 hours of nutrition education for medical students. Any school that showed such “leadership,” he said, would be publicly celebrated in Washington.
Mr. Kennedy has long been at odds with the medical establishment, especially over vaccination. This recent push, however, is part of Mr. Kennedy’s effort to find some common ground, according to a person familiar with the nutrition initiative who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss it before Thursday’s formal announcement.
Politics are also at work. As the midterm elections approach, the White House has made clear it would like the health secretary to pivot away from contentious issues, like vaccination, and toward subjects that polls say are popular with people in both parties, like healthy eating.
Mr. Kennedy’s letter in January suggested 71 topics that medical schools could consider for their curriculums.
Some, such as understanding nutrient deficiencies and food allergies, were similar to an expert-backed list of competencies for doctors-in-training published in 2024.
Others — like promoting dietary supplements and “wearable” devices — aren’t backed by solid evidence. Some focused on how food is grown, suggesting that medical students should train in “soil sampling, composting and crop rotation.”
Many of these lessons may not translate to better patient care, Dr. Nestle said. When it comes to nutrition, the most important thing for medical students to learn is how to work with dietitians, who have far more time and expertise to counsel patients on what to eat, Dr. Nestle said. But Mr. Kennedy’s recommendations do not directly mention dietitians’ role, except in a section on billing for their services.
The 2024 report identified screening for food insecurity, or whether people have access to enough nutritious and safe food, as a top priority for medical schools. Mr. Kennedy’s curriculum does not explicitly emphasize the topic.
That omission is in line with the Trump administration’s cancellation of the government’s annual survey of food insecurity last fall.
The historically broad support for expanding nutrition training for new doctors may have helped Mr. Kennedy convert some skeptics, or at least persuade them to curtail their criticisms for now. The Association of American Medical Colleges, which warned Mr. Kennedy last year against “one-size-fits-all or government-mandated approaches,” will send a representative to this week’s announcement.
Dr. Alison Whelan, the association’s chief academic officer, said the group was supporting the initiative after receiving assurances that the health department would not mandate a certain curriculum or require all schools to sign on to the plan.
And a spokesman for the Federation of State Medical Boards, one of the sponsors of the medical licensure exam, said in an email this week that program officials were “actively planning further nutrition-related enhancements to the exam.”
Some schools have not commented on the plan. For example, Harvard, which has tangled with Mr. Kennedy’s department for months, said it “remains committed to ongoing review, revision and improvement of educational programming in nutrition and other important areas.”
It stopped short, though, of backing Mr. Kennedy’s plan.
Michael C. Bender contributed reporting.
Alan Blinder is a national correspondent for The Times, covering education.
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