Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is taking bold, long-overdue action to fix a glaring failure in American medicine: the near-total absence of nutrition education in medical schools. At a recent event in North Carolina, Kennedy announced his intention to require all U.S. medical schools to implement nutrition courses—or risk losing federal funding from the Department of Health and Human Services.
“There’s almost no nutrition training in our medical schools,” Kennedy said. “Doctors are trained to treat disease with drugs, not prevent it with food.” That’s about to change. Kennedy, who has long championed health freedom and the prevention of chronic disease, says medical schools must modernize or risk losing taxpayer funding.
The move is part of a broader strategy to shift America’s healthcare focus from pharmaceutical dependency to true prevention. Chronic illnesses like obesity, diabetes, and heart disease are skyrocketing—yet most doctors receive less than 20 hours of nutrition education in four years of training.
RFK Jr.’s approach is winning praise from public health leaders like Harvard’s Dr. David Eisenberg, who called the initiative “long overdue.” A 2015 review of 121 U.S. medical schools found widespread failure to prepare doctors for real-world nutrition guidance, despite rising demand from patients for food-based solutions.
Though some schools argue they already offer nutrition content, Kennedy and his team want consistency, not lip service. Experts are now developing a national nutrition curriculum with 36 core competencies for future physicians.
This is RFK Jr.’s vision in action: empowering Americans to take control of their health, cutting the pharmaceutical leash, and returning medicine to its roots—treating the cause, not just the symptoms. It’s time doctors learned that food isn’t just fuel. It’s medicine.
