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Same is the situation in India as well, where Doctors themselves lament that unfortunately, the structure of medical education is designed in such a way that Nutrition is completely out of their study.

Most US medical schools do not require medical students to learn basic nutrition theory, even though poor diet is the leading preventable risk factor for disability or early death in the United States.[1,2] “It takes at least 25-30 hours of medical school instruction to achieve just basic nutrition competencies,” according to an expert committee of the Nutrition Academic Award Program of the National Institutes of Health,[3] Martin Kohlmeier, MD, professor in the Department of Nutrition at the University.

“It takes at least 25-30 hours of medical school instruction to achieve just basic nutrition competencies,” according to an expert committee of the Nutrition Academic Award Program of the National Institutes of Health,^[3] Martin Kohlmeier, MD, professor in the Department of Nutrition at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill and researcher at the UNC Nutrition Research Institute, told Medscape.

However, from 2000 to 2012, medical students only received a median of 16-20 hours of nutrition education, on the basis of surveys conducted by Kohlmeier’s team every 4 years since 2000.^[1,4] Partial data from the 2016 survey show that “nothing has changed,” Dr Kohlmeier said. “Nutrition education in medical school continues to be inadequate.”

The US Burden of Disease Collaboration group identified that a poor-quality diet is “an even bigger problem than physical inactivity or obesity itself,”^[2] Stephen Devries, MD, a cardiologist at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois, and executive director of the nonprofit Gaples Institute for Integrative Cardiology, told Medscape. “Poor-quality diet trumps all of those, including tobacco.”

Part of the problem is that “each medical school is free to address the issue [of nutrition education] as they wish,” according to Dr Kohlmeier. “Some are doing a much better job, and some are doing a poor job.” Medical students are not required to obtain a basic knowledge of nutrition, unlike anatomy, for example. “That’s the problem,” he said.

Source: Nutrition Training for Young Doctors Lacks Bite

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