As some medical schools embrace RFK Jr.’s nutrition push, they deftly sidestep MAHA priorities

STAT News – Monday, July 27, 2026
By Lauren Chan

When students return to McGovern Medical School at UT Health Houston this year, they will get to participate in hands-on nutrition experiences, including cooking demonstrations in the teaching kitchen, tours of the campus “holistic garden,” and the opportunity to take a culinary-medicine-focused elective.

These immersive programs are a response to health secretary Robert F. Kennedy’s call for medical schools to teach more nutrition — part of the Trump administration’s push to address the rising rates of chronic diseases in the United States. Kennedy has blamed the problem, in part, on doctors not routinely discussing diet and nutrition with their patients.

Lessons in culinary medicine are part of the 71 nutrition-related topics that the Department of Health and Human Services wants future physicians to be well versed in. Other topics in the department’s Advancing Nutrition Education push include enhancing nutrient bioavailability through soaking, sprouting, and fermenting foods as well as prioritizing food-based medicine as the primary approach to manage chronic diseases driven by metabolic dysfunction.

The vast majority of 163 M.D.-granting and 48 D.O.-granting schools aren’t yet part of Kennedy’s new initiative, including several leading institutions. So far, some 73 medical schools — 54 M.D. programs, 19 D.O. programs — across 36 states have signed on.

Even as some medical schools heed Kennedy’s call for more nutrition education, several told STAT that they plan to steer clear of topics that aren’t backed by evidence, including some that align with the priorities of the Make America Healthy Again political movement championed by the health secretary. Nutrition experts cautioned that some of those topics could lead to “wellness creep” in medical education.

“So long as it’s evidence-based and so long as there’s enough studies out there to support it, I would definitely look into it,” said Sapna Rama, an assistant professor leading the efforts at Orlando College of Osteopathic Medicine to revamp their nutrition curriculum. “If any topics are controversial, there’s just not enough studies out there, I put it aside, and as data grows, we’ll evaluate.”

As part of the curriculum revamp, the Orlando, Fla., school will be partnering with a local farm focused on culinary medicine and offering a weeklong immersive nutrition course for their students, said Rama. These opportunities are part of a new program called From Plate to Patient, “designed to prepare future physicians to integrate nutrition into clinical practice.”

A number of prominent medical schools including Stanford University, Brown University, and the University of Chicago are missing from the list of participating institutions. These schools did not respond to STAT’s request for comment. A spokesperson for Harvard University, which is also missing from HHS’ list of participating schools, said that its medical school “has long recognized the importance of nutrition education and is proud to be a leader in including and promoting nutrition as a crucial curriculum element.”

Lisa Howley, senior director for transforming medical education at the Association of American Medical Colleges, and Robyn Phillips-Madson, chair of the Commission on Osteopathic College Accreditation, both emphasized that nutrition has been a longstanding component of medical education. Several medical schools, including those that are updating their nutrition curriculum this fall in response to the HHS push, told STAT that they already have a robust nutrition curriculum that meets or exceeds 40 hours of instruction.

Sara Police, an associate professor leading the efforts at the University of Kentucky, said the school started with an assessment of its current nutrition curriculum to see what else could be added. Police said the goal was to help future physicians apply what they learn in a “patient-facing” way.

That sentiment was echoed by staff at LSU Health New Orleans, where Robin English, the associate dean for undergraduate medical education, and nutrition professor and dietitian Lauri Byerley recently updated the Louisiana school’s nutrition curriculum. The changes, they hope, will help their students feel more confident talking about diet and lifestyle with their future patients.

At the University of Nebraska, Stephanie Hartman, an assistant professor of internal medicine and co-chair of the curriculum committee’s Nutrition Task Force, said students already do food bank visits and rotations with dietitians. Hartman couldn’t think of any new courses the school has added as part of the HHS initiative, because it already offers similar opportunities, including an elective program where students can spend a day learning knife skills and preparing a meal around the Mediterranean diet.

Hung up on evidence, and ‘wellness creep’

Out of the 71 nutrition “competencies” that HHS proposed, about 28 were adapted from the recommendations in a 2024 JAMA consensus statement on nutrition education in medical schools. The JAMA statement recommended 36 competencies or topics, crafted by a multidisciplinary panel of experts. The 43 new competencies in the HHS list were “created with input from leading nutrition experts from medical schools across the country,” according to a spokesperson. 

Some registered dietitian nutritionists told STAT that they are worried that several of the competencies added by HHS may not be backed by sufficient evidence yet — they pointed out topics such as individual biomonitoring through wearable technologies as well as referring patients to health coaches, a wellness label that has no standardized definition or credentialing requirement.

Kevin Klatt, a registered dietitian and nutrition professor at the University of Toronto, warned that “wellness creep” is a concern if HHS endorses nutrition opinions that are not evidence-based. “If it all becomes a green juices and turmeric and low-carb diet wellness pipeline sort of thing, it’s just taking us away from recognizing real nutrition issues.”

Several medical schools told STAT that they couldn’t justify including some of the HHS-suggested nutrition competencies — including regenerative agriculture, soil sampling, and restoring soil microbiota — in their curriculum because they did not seem relevant for their students.

“Our goal is not to create everyone to be a nutrition expert,” said Victoriano Valdez, a certified culinary medicine specialist and an assistant professor of internal medicine at McGovern Medical School in Houston. At McGovern, the goal was to strengthen students’ practical understanding of nutrition as it relates to health management and counseling patients effectively. “We don’t need to reinvent any wheels. Rather, we need to highlight and take advantage of the wheels that we already have,” added Valdez, who’s leading the school’s efforts to advance its nutrition curriculum.

Some of the competencies suggested by HHS — such as patient food journaling and meal planning — have historically been the domain of registered dietitian nutritionists.

“Frankly, I don’t really need my physician to be trained in food journaling,” said Katie Suleta, a public health researcher. Asking physicians to do this kind of work is adding to an already heavy workload, the former director of research in graduate medical education for HCA Healthcare stated. Suleta and others noted that the limited time with patients should be allocated to topics that only doctors can help them with.

Byerley at LSU, a dietitian herself, said that the goal is for their students to be able to discuss nutrition, even if they are not the only person on the care team focusing on nutritional status. “They might not necessarily be getting into the nitty-gritty, but they should feel comfortable asking about nutrition,” including identifying nutrition problems, solutions, and resources for patients, she said.

An HHS spokesperson said that the nutrition topics in the department’s list of competencies are a suggestion rather than a mandate.

Even as nutrition experts and medical schools were wary of the evidence behind some of the competencies suggested by HHS, they were also surprised that the official list excluded several topics recommended in the JAMA consensus statement. Common themes among the excluded topics were sensitive and nonjudgemental conversations about food, obesity, or eating disorders; understanding the impacts of social determinants of health on patients’ food choices; and communicating with patients in their preferred language and at their health literacy level.

Excluding these competencies, some experts said, feels like an extension of the Trump administration’s push against diversity, equity, and inclusion, and downplayed the role of external factors that impact health.

Suleta viewed the exclusion as a sign that the administration views obesity and related health conditions as a personal choice. “It’s your choice. If you’re fat, it’s bad. And it’s a moral failing on your part.” She said this undermines doctors’ ability to address how social determinants of health impact chronic disease. “Food is not going to cure all of these illnesses. It’s just not,” said Suleta.

Every medical school that STAT spoke with insisted that they will continue to train their students on how to have compassionate, culturally sensitive nutrition conversations with patients from all walks of life.

“My personal goals for my graduates are that they can practice excellent, compassionate care and that their future patients say, ‘I love my doctor.’ Part of that is being able to talk to patients with empathy and compassion, judgment-free,” said English.

Doctors or dietitians?

Nutrition education can be useful as part of a broader strategy to address what the federal health department sees as a worrisome rise in diet-related chronic diseases, but several experts said there are other opportunities that the administration should consider simultaneously.

“Why don’t you just make it easier for people to see a dietitian?” asked Leah McGrath, a registered dietitian and founder of Build Up Dietitians, a social media platform that seeks to amplify science-based nutrition messaging. McGrath stressed that for medical school nutrition education to be effective, it should coincide with referrals to dietitians and better insurance coverage of nutrition care.

Medicare currently covers dietetics services only for people with diabetes, kidney disease, or those who have received a kidney transplant if referred by a doctor.

The limited insurance coverage for nutrition and dietetics services is a long-standing issue, according to Kelly Horton, the senior vice president of public policy and government relations at the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, a professional organization representing more than 112,000 credentialed nutrition and dietetics practitioners. She said that the bipartisan-supported Medical Nutrition Therapy Act — introduced in February, and currently pending at the Senate Committee on Finance — is a key opportunity in the battle against chronic disease. It would expand nutrition service coverage to other conditions like obesity, prediabetes, high blood pressure, and cancer. The proposed legislation has been unsuccessfully introduced multiple times throughout the 2020s, but Horton hopes the recent interest in nutrition might convince federal lawmakers to act on it.

The lack of support for nutrition legislation is compounded by the heavy cuts to the supplemental food assistance known as SNAP and elimination of related educational programs, both of which have been shown to significantly improve access to healthy food, and reduce the burden of chronic disease.

Klatt worries that the administration’s focus on individualized health responsibility and the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” mentality undermine its ability to combat chronic disease.

“The whole thing is political theater,” Klatt quipped. “They’re rolling back nutrition support systems and doubling down on how everybody should become a tradwife.”

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