Secretary Kennedy's Statement on Nutrition in Medical Schools

Hey everybody, I'm Robert F. Kennedy Jr., your HHS secretary. Today, the Trump administration is demanding bold reform in our medical education system. I'm leading a team at HHS with the support of Secretary McMahon at the Department of Education that targets a situation that everyone has long recognized as wrong, but no one has yet had the gumption to fix. It's the woeful lack of nutrition education in medicine. Poor diet drives America's chronic disease crisis, fueling seven of our 10 deadliest conditions. Each year, it claims an estimated 1 million American lives through diet related illnesses. 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. The good news is that diet not only causes these conditions, it can also prevent and reverse them. But for too long, we've instead analyzed the chronic disease crisis, commissioned studies, and pontificated about the importance of nutrition without taking any meaningful action. Recent data reveals a critical disconnect. Although all medical schools claim to include nutrition in their curricula, most medical students report receiving no formal nutrition education throughout their entire training. This leads to a troubling reality. Most medical students recognize nutrition as necessary. Nearly all medical residents are asked to counsel patients about nutrition, but fewer than a quarter of practicing physicians feel adequately prepared to provide nutrition advice. We can reverse the chronic disease epidemic simply by changing our diets and lifestyles. 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 premed programs and testing it on the MCAT. Every future physician should master the language of prevention before they even touch a stethoscope. Under President Trump's leadership, we are going to systematically transform nutrition education throughout American medicine. for more than 200 of America's medical schools, 13,000 residency and fellowship programs, and ultimately each of the nation's 1.1 million practicing physicians. In the future, doctors won't just prescribe drugs. They'll be able to prescribe diets as well by confidently screening for diet related diseases and collaborating with nutrition experts to recommend foodbased solutions. Our reforms will save our country hundreds of billions of dollars and prevent millions of debilitating chronic diseases. This is an approach that is both radical and common sense. We're going to reconnect medicine with its roots. Hypocrates, the father of medicine, said, "Let food be thy medicine, and medicine be thy food." His advice remains true today, and we're bringing back food to its proper place in medicine. Produced by the US Department of Health and Human Services.