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For decades, American medical schools managed the remarkable feat of graduating physicians into one of the most overfed and metabolically battered societies in the developed world while devoting almost no instructional hours to nutrition. But RFK Jr. is giving these schools a checkup.
53 medical schools in 31 states have now signed on to expand their nutrition curriculum to 40 hours, with the American Medical Association and the Association of American Medical Colleges both backing the initiative. This support is striking given how readily many of these institutions dismiss RFK Jr. as a crank. The more important question, however, is why it took decades for medical schools to correct such an obvious omission.
The answer has something, if not everything, to do with where medical schools get much of their funding.
Pharmaceutical companies have historically provided roughly half of the funding for continuing medical education in the United States—a relationship long recognized as a serious conflict of interest and one that naturally produces a curriculum oriented toward the prescription pad rather than the produce aisle. As the National Library of Medicine has noted, preventive care remains underpracticed largely because providers are paid to treat disease rather than prevent it. One might accuse me of conspiracy-mongering for suggesting that funders shape what institutions teach, but when the 1990s Food Pyramid turned out to be agricultural policy dressed up as nutritional science, it settled the question of whether supposedly neutral guidelines might serve priorities other than public health.
The demand that medical schools teach nutrition is one part of RFK Jr.’s broader Make America Healthy Again agenda. Separately, he has also moved to overhaul federal dietary policy itself. The new Health and Human Services and USDA guidelines now invert the old pyramid entirely, prioritizing protein, healthy fats, and dairy while reducing emphasis on grains. Whether the replacement is itself free from industry influence is a fair question, but the carbohydrate-first orthodoxy that has shaped American eating for the last three decades needed to go.
So, the nutrition curriculum expansion is a genuine win, and credit should be given where it’s due. But we should still keep a watchful eye on medical schools. Signing onto nutrition instruction does not mean these institutions are broadly returning to science. As I reported in last year’s Speech First report, Critical Condition: How Medical Schools Are Forcing DEI Orthodoxy on Future Physicians, they remain deeply entangled in ideological frameworks such as teaching that obesity has no meaningful link to health outcomes, that biological sex is subordinate to gender identity, and that the physician’s role extends to correcting historical racial injustices.
RFK Jr. has put medical schools on a diet. But a healthy meal won’t cure a sick institution.
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