Accrediting bodies, more medical schools commit to RFK Jr.'s nutrition education pledge

Several accreditation and assessment organizations as well as an additional 19 medical schools have joined the Trump administration’s call for greater integration of nutritional learning in medical education, department heads announced Monday afternoon. 

The effort, headlined by Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., had notched pledges from 53 medical schools back in March to update their curricula with at least 40 hours of nutrition education or a competency equivalent starting in the upcoming fall semester. 

Officials and organization heads had described that pledge as voluntary and cooperative, and did so again with the new pledge participants on Monday. Specifically, they said the new batch of schools—Texas A&M University, the University of Massachusetts and the University of Tennessee Health Sciences Center, among others—had come forward on their own in the weeks following the initial unveiling. 

With 73 medical schools now signed on, the momentum isn’t just a “symbolic achievement. It is a structural change,” Kennedy said during a Monday presentation. 

Officials specified that the schools would not face any monetary penalties should they fall short of the 40-hour curricula goal. Kennedy also suggested that the schools will likely have differences in the specifics of their curricula, and that outside of guideline recommendations the departments wouldn’t dictate what nutrition information is taught. 

The push broached newer ground Monday with the accrediting bodies. Eight were outlined on stage and in an accompanying release: The National Board of Medical Examiners, the National Board of Osteopathic Medical Examiners, the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education, the Liaison Committee on Medical Education, the Commission on Osteopathic College Accreditation, the American Board of Medical Specialties, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education and the American Association of Colleges of Osteopathic Medicine.

Kennedy said those organizations have spent the past 10 months reviewing their standards against published evidence on nutrition and have committed to measurable change in their processes. He specifically highlighted changes from the National Board of Medical Examiners, which will have about 15% of content across the examination sequence assessing nutrition and clinical application, and a similar commitment from National Board of Osteopathic Medical Examiners.

“That means nutrition will no longer sit at the margins of medical education. It will shape what students learn, what physicians master, what licensing boards assess and ultimately how patients receive care,” Kennedy said. “Education drives practice, practice drives outcomes and outcomes determine the health of the nation. That’s why today’s commitments represent one of the most important course corrections in modern American medicine.”

A ninth group—the Association of American Medical Colleges, which is the leading organization representing the nation’s medical educations and a co-sponsor of the accrediting Liaison Committee on Medical Education— had been in attendance at March’s initial announcement and was also highlighted by Kennedy during Monday’s event. 

Kennedy also took time to highlight an early step of the National Institutes of Health’s support of nutrition curriculum research—a $2.1 million challenge to identify, reward and scale most effective approaches to integrating nutrition in medical and nurse education. Findings and approaches from the winner of that challenge will be made publicly available for broader adoption, he said. 

Joining the health secretary were officials from the Department of Education and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. 

For the latter, Administrator Mehmet Oz, M.D., said his agency has been pulling its levers to incentivize a greater emphasis on nutrition in care. 

First and foremost, he said CMS had heavily weighed nutrition strategies in the funding proposals it judged for the $50 billion Rural Health Transformation Fund. To boost their awards, 24 states outlined plans to include nutrition in their criteria for Continuing Medical Education (CME).

“And they got more money—significantly more—because they were willing to teach within the CME process about nutrition,” Oz said during the event. 

The administrator then pointed to the recent effort from a Florida children’s hospital to overhaul its menu with fresh food from local providers “with less than a 5% increase in budget,” he said was due in part to the unpalatable food typically served by hospitals going uneaten and discarded. CMS previously highlighted that pledge in late March alongside a Quality and Safety Special Alert Memo urging Medicare hospitals nationwide to align their menus with updated dietary guidance.

Whereas the secretary and healthcare groups have often butted heads on issues like vaccination, public health monitoring and “overmedicalization,” nutrition has been an area of consistent agreement. March’s announcement, for instance, was attended by tAmerican Medical Association President Bobby Mukkamala, M.D., who echoed Kennedy’s view that nutrition had long been “treated as an elective in medical education” and warranted more focus.