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Sigma Nutrition Radio

#587: How Should Nutrition Be Taught in Medical Training? – Akash Patel

Sigma Nutrition Radio

Danny Lennon

Health & Fitness, Nutrition

4.8 • 633 Ratings

🗓️ 16 December 2025

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This episode centers on the critical gap in nutrition education within medical training and efforts to bridge it. Guest Akash Patel, a medical student who led a pilot nutrition curriculum, discusses why doctors receive little formal training in nutrition despite poor diet being a major driver of disease. With diet-related conditions (obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, etc.) contributing heavily to morbidity and healthcare costs, the conversation highlights a pivotal push to better equip physicians in nutritional knowledge and counseling.

Patel's work comes at a turning point: there are now calls for standardized nutrition competencies in medical education (e.g., a recent JAMA consensus) and a growing recognition that improving doctors' nutrition literacy could enhance patient care and public trust. But at the same time, medical programs already have a huge workload and little space is available for appropriate training. Others state that nutrition shouldn't fall within the remit of doctors. So how do we reconcile all this?

While this episode focuses on the United States context, the concepts apply to other countries, as it outlines both the challenges and the emerging solutions for closing the nutrition training gap in medicine.

Timestamps

  • [03:21] Akash Patel's background and interests
  • [05:22] Current state of nutrition education in medical schools
  • [07:55] Akash's pilot program and initial findings
  • [13:37] Challenges and considerations for curriculum integration
  • [15:11] Effective curriculum design for nutrition education
  • [23:38] Debating the role of nutrition education in medical training
  • [29:00] Practical scenarios and the role of doctors
  • [33:58] Advice for implementing nutrition education initiatives
  • [38:15] Future directions in nutrition and medicine
  • [43:07] Key ideas segment

Links & Resources

Transcript

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0:00.0

Hello and welcome to Sigma Nutrition Radio. This is episode 587 of the podcast. My name is Danny Lennon,

0:07.9

and you are very welcome to the show. Today we're going to be talking about all of the conversation

0:13.4

that goes on around nutrition education within medical training, which has, of course,

0:18.5

been going on for a long period of time, various different

0:21.5

opinions on this topic, not only what can be done, but if something needs to be done.

0:27.6

And this has come more to the forefront, even in recent times, with not only interest within

0:33.2

medical programs and academia, but now more in policy and certain political conversations,

0:39.2

we're starting to see discussions particularly around this. To talk through this idea,

0:43.8

today I'm going to be joined by Akash Patel, who is a fourth year medical student at the

0:49.5

University of Miami, Miller School of Medicine. And he recently ran and published a pilot trial looking at

0:58.4

the potential integration of more nutrition within a medical training program, gauging the

1:04.5

interest of the students, the feedback on some of the lecture series that they ran, and things

1:10.0

that they would like to see going forward.

1:12.4

He's also been very aware of some of the literature that's been published in this area

1:17.2

that has laid out proposed nutrition competency for medical students and trainees who are going

1:23.9

to be go on into careers in medicine and much around this conversation more generally

1:30.2

and so he's perfectly placed to talk through some of these conversations of being going on

1:34.9

potential ideas put forward various types of roadmaps and if something was going to change

1:40.8

within a medical curriculum what things should those be? How could they be

1:45.3

achieved? Are they realistic to be achieved? And what is the best way to integrate that? So we're

1:50.8

going to be talking through all of this stuff and hopefully getting to a point that covers

1:55.2

some of this discussion as to whether does something need to be done. If so, to what extent, is it possible?

...

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