We ask a lot of questions about our diet.

What's the right way to treat a chronic illness,

fight off a virus, lose weight?

The problem is we get a lot of different answers.

Well, I'm here to help.

Welcome to the Nutrition Facts podcast.

I'm your host Dr. Michael Greger.

Let's see if you know more about basic nutrition than most doctors.

Here's our first story.

A poor diet now outranks smoking as the leading cause of death on the planet,

as well specifically in the United States.

In the U.S., the number one killer of Americans is the American diet.

So if diet is humanity's number one killer, then obviously it's the number one thing taught in medical school, right?

Sadly, medical students around the world are poorly trained in nutrition.

It's not that medical students aren't interested in learning about it. Medical

schools just aren't teaching it. Without a solid foundation of clinical nutrition knowledge

and skills, physicians worldwide are generally not equipped to even begin to have an informed

conversation about nutrition with their patients. How bad is it? One study assessing the

clinical nutrition knowledge of medical doctors found the majority got 70% of the questions wrong,

and there were multiple choice questions, so they should have gotten about a fifth right just

by chance. And the wrong answers were not limited to difficult or demanding questions.

For example, less than half.

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