Hi, Yves. It’s all well and good to encourage all doctors to get nutrition training, but advocates should look into this so-called nutrition and contact me. There is little to no good foundation because solid studies are lacking. It requires a very long-term effort with frequent and accurate reporting. The most solid studies use nurses as a sample group. Most people lie about what they eat and how much they eat.
On a related issue, what I have seen from my limited contact with people with degrees in nutrition is enough to make one wary. Look at the food served in most hospitals; their menus are created by nutritionists. My mother was forced to eat things I would refuse to eat: turkey on white bread, pasta with red sauce, canned sweet fruit, breakfast cereal (and I don’t mean oatmeal).
One of my sisters-in-law got her master’s in nutrition. Maybe things have changed since then, but she told me there were two programs: one for people who wanted to work for a big food company and learn how to make fast food and junk food taste better, and one that focused on the health benefits. The problem with the latter is that I have no idea what she studied. For example, she got pregnant after her degree. Her doctor told her she needed to eat more protein. She told me that’s why she started eating cheese every day.
Cheese is a very inefficient way to get protein — one ounce of hard cheese (she was eating hard cheese) contains 54 calories of fat and 32 calories of protein — and she was already overweight when she became pregnant, so she didn’t need to increase her body fat levels.
Another is that diet advice goes in and out of fashion, due to the fundamental difficulty of doing good research. Wine in moderation is good for you. Alcohol of any kind is bad for you. Coffee was bad before people started saying it was good for you. Tea, at least, seems to have always been good for you, except when you drink it with milk the English way.
Well, I did come across one exception, and it was discovered by a group I call the Sports Mafia. The Sports Mafia is a group of doctors and highly skilled trainers who worked primarily with professional athletes, Olympians, and a few ordinary people who found them for rehabilitation. Remember that athletes and bodybuilders alike eat for their sports. There are real stakes here, so you need to be careful about what works for you. Diet fetishists may remember the Zone craze, which was designed for long-distance athletes such as runners and long-distance swimmers (the Zone works, but you have to manage your life around it, and most people give up). Similarly, pizza turns out to be very suitable for soccer players right before a match, given the timing of the post-meal calorie intake.
The professor in question taught nutrition at Ohio State University and worked part-time as a physician, experimenting with dietary treatments on willing patients. One of his standard lines was that he had a patient with a total cholesterol level of 400, but wasn’t worried because his HDL level was only 300.
While I was listening to his lecture (there were about 20 people in the room and I was the only non-trainer), he asked, “Does anyone have any cookies?” A woman shyly raised her hand. She had a small pack of cookies that were supposed to be healthy. He asked her to bring them over.
He said, “The second or third ingredient is definitely hydrogenated fat.” It was number three.
He continued, “It’s a preservative. It keeps the cookies from spoiling. It removes the substance from the food, so if you put a pound on the counter, it’s still the same after a year. No cockroaches can touch it.”
Granted, this is anecdotal data, but I’ve never seen anything written by a so-called nutrition expert that would change my overall bleak view.
by Nathaniel Johnson, assistant professor of nutrition at the University of North Dakota, and Madeline Comeau, a medical student at the University of North Dakota. conversation
In TV shows like “Grey’s Anatomy,” “The Resident” and “Chicago Med,” doctors always seem to have the right answer.
But when it comes to nutrition and dietary advice, that may not be the case.
One of us Assistant Professor of Nutrition; The other one is Medical student with a Master’s in Nutrition.
We both understand the powerful influence food has on our health and longevity. Unhealthy eating habits can: Cardiovascular disease, Diabetes, obesity And even the psychological state depression and anxietyFood-related illnesses Leading causes of death In America, unhealthy eating habits It causes more deaths than smoking.
These health problems are common and debilitating, but they’re also expensive. Treating high blood pressure, diabetes, and high cholesterol costs about $400 billion a year. Within 25 years, these costs will It is expected to triple to $1.3 trillion.
These facts support the need for doctors to give accurate dietary advice to prevent these diseases. But how much does the average doctor know about nutrition?
Deficits in nutrition education occur at all levels of medical training.
What doctors don’t know
In a survey of more than 1,000 U.S. medical students in 2023, about 58% of respondents No formal nutrition education Students who studied nutrition during their four years of medical school spent an average of about three hours per year studying nutrition.
this is, American Board of Medical Education and Nutrition In 1985, medical students totaled 25 hours of nutrition education That’s just over six hours per year while in school.
However, a 2015 survey found that only 29% of medical schools This goal was achievedThe problem is even worse in the 2023 survey, with only 7.8% of medical students reported receiving 20 or more hours of nutrition education throughout the four years of medical school. If this is representative of medical schools across the country, it is happening despite efforts to strengthen nutrition education. Through numerous government initiatives.
Not surprisingly, this lack of education has a direct impact on physicians’ nutritional knowledge. In a study that administered a nutritional quiz to 257 first- and second-year osteopathic medical students, Half of them failed the testBefore the test, more than half of the students (55%) were comfortable counseling patients about nutrition.
Unfortunately, this problem is not unique to U.S. medical schools. A 2018 global survey found that nutrition education for medical students in all countries is poor. There is a worldwide shortage.
Restoring nutrition education
The evidence suggests Nutrition education is effectivethere are There are many reasons for the shortageMedical students and physicians are some of the busiest people in society. It is often said that the amount of information taught in the medical curriculum can be overwhelming, like drinking water from a fire hose.
First- and second-year medical students focus on esoteric topics such as biochemistry, molecular biology, and genetics while learning clinical skills such as taking a patient history and understanding heart and lung sounds. Third- and fourth-year medical students do their placements in clinics and hospitals, learning from doctors and patients.
As a result, their schedules are already packed. They have no time for nutrition. And becoming a doctor won’t help the situation. Providing preventative care, including nutrition counseling, to patients requires 7+ hours per week This doesn’t include the time you must spend on continuing education to keep up with new discoveries in nutritional science.
Furthermore, the lack of nutrition education in medical schools is believed to be due to a lack of qualified instructors for nutrition courses, and most doctors I don’t understand nutrition well enough to teach it..
Ironically, many medical schools are part of universities that have nutrition departments with PhD-educated professors who could fill this gap by teaching nutrition to medical students, but these classes are often taught by physicians who may not have had extensive nutrition training, meaning that some of the truly talented instructors available at most medical schools are excluded from this process.
Finding the right advice
The best source of nutrition information for medical students and the general public is Registered Dietitian, Certified Dietitian Or other types of nutrition professionals with multiple degrees and certifications, who have studied for years and logged many practice hours to provide dietary advice.
Anyone can schedule an appointment with a dietitian for a dietary consultation, but you usually need a referral from a doctor or other health care provider for the appointment to be covered by insurance, so you’ll often need to meet with your doctor or other primary care provider before seeing a dietitian.
This extra step may be one reason why many people look for nutrition advice elsewhere, such as on their phone, but the worst place to look for accurate nutrition information is social media. Nutrition and diet posts are less valuable – Is inaccurate or lacks sufficient data to support the claims.
Remember, anyone can post nutrition advice on social media, regardless of qualifications. Good dietary advice is personalised and takes into account age, gender, goals, weight, objectives and personal preferences. This complexity can be difficult to convey in a short social media post.
The good news is that with nutrition education: EffectiveAnd most medical students and doctors The important role nutrition plays in healthIn fact, nearly 90% of medical students said they had no nutrition education. Required Subjects for Medical School.
After decades of neglect and ignorance, nutrition education is hopefully set to become an integral part of every medical school curriculum in the near future. However, given the history and current state of nutrition education, it seems unlikely that this will happen anytime soon.
In the meantime, if you want to learn more about healthy eating, see a nutrition expert or at least 2020-2025 Dietary Guidelines for Americans or World Health Organization Healthy eating recommendations.
