Med Schools Risk Funding Cuts Within a Year for Lack of Nutrition Courses, RFK Jr. Warns

In April, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy (RFK) Jr. announced his plans to notify medical schools that they will lose federal funding if they do not offer nutrition courses aimed at teaching students how to provide holistic treatment for patients. According to Kennedy, nutrition education is lacking in America’s medical schools, and as a result, students “are taught how to treat illnesses with drugs but not how to treat them with food or to keep people healthy so they don’t need the drugs.”

Since ending his short-lived presidential run, RFK Jr. has remained outspoken about the chronic disease epidemic and the role that ultra-processed foods and toxic ingredients play in fueling it. 

Now, under his leadership, the Department of Health and Human Services is taking a rare but welcome step: pressuring medical schools to take more responsibility for how they train future physicians to prevent and treat diseases.

The need for such a shift is obvious. 

[RELATED: Top Medical Schools Teach Weight Inclusivity, Racial Justice, Report Says]

Today’s medical field leans heavily on pharmaceuticals while giving little attention to prevention or lifestyle-based treatment, especially when it comes to nutrition. Most medical students receive shockingly little education on the subject. 

According to one national survey, the majority of medical students spend fewer than 20 hours learning about nutrition over the course of their four-year education.

But the problem goes deeper than mere oversight. Medical schools, like much of higher education, have become saturated with ideological commitments that crowd out practical knowledge. Speech First’s recent report, Critical Condition: How Medical Schools Are Forcing DEI Orthodoxy on Future Physicians, exposes how the same ideological rot undermining academic standards in four-year programs is also embedded in medical training.

Released in April, the report reveals how top medical schools have embraced sweeping commitments to racial and gender activism—and, most absurdly, to “weight inclusivity.” At the University of Texas at Austin, for example, students are instructed to avoid terms like “obese” or “overweight” in favor of euphemisms such as “people with larger body size.”

This ideological commitment distracts medical students, training them to prioritize emotional sensitivities over clinical accuracy and evidence-based care. Add to this the absence of nutrition courses—a core element of preventative medicine—students are left completely adrift. 

As Dr. Jo Marie Reilly, a professor at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine, told ABC News, there is a lack of uniform standards that medical schools must follow when teaching nutrition, leaving these schools to decide what to teach. Reilly is part of a group of medical and nutrition experts that published recommendations last year for a national curriculum, which includes 36 “nutritional competencies” for medical students to meet.

Until that curriculum is adopted, however, we’re left with a generation of doctors undertrained in prevention and overtrained in ideology.

[RELATED: Medical Education Is Infected with DEI]

So, RFK’s plan to cut funding unless medical schools teach nutrition is a step in the right direction. As I’ve previously reported, RFK Jr. has the right idea when it comes to food. Seventy percent of college students eat fast food at least once a day, and many have little choice. Colleges and universities often require students, especially freshmen, to purchase costly meal plans that are built around on-campus vendors, which include fast food franchises.

At the University of Missouri, for example, the school touts its “healthy” dining options, but its lineup includes Panda Express, Subway, and two Starbucks locations. Starbucks, known for drinks packed with additives, preservatives, and artificial flavorings, is hardly the kind of vendor students should have easy access to.

Bad diet plays a major role in the rise of chronic disease in America. Yet instead of training future doctors to prevent illness through nutrition and lifestyle, most medical schools lean heavily on pharmaceuticals, while doubling down on radical ideology.

While no official cuts have been made, RFK Jr. says schools that fail to add nutrition courses could lose funding within the year. Time will tell if he follows through.

Image: “Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.” by Gage Skidmore on Wikimedia Commons