UT Health Sciences Joins National Initiative to Advance Nutrition Education in Healthcare Training

"Nutrition is not a side issue in healthcare, it's fundamental to many of the things that we need to have a healthy lifespan," UT Health Sciences Vice Chancellor for Research Jessica Snowden, MD, told a national audience Monday during a press conference hosted by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in Washington, D.C.

Dr. Snowden, a pediatrician, was the only representative of academic healthcare institutions chosen to speak about a new HHS initiative to strengthen nutrition education in the nation's healthcare training programs. She joined HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz, MD.

The Advancing Nutrition Education Across the Medical Continuum initiative encourages America's leading medical education institutions to add comprehensive nutrition education and training into their curriculum.

The HHS initiative asks participating institutions to work toward providing a minimum of 40 hours of nutrition education in health professional training or a 40-hour competency equivalent starting this fall. The intent is to reinforce the critical role of nutrition in improving patient outcomes and advancing public health.

More than 70 institutions in 36 states have committed to the initiative. This equates to 52,000-plus students receiving enhanced nutrition education, according to HHS.

UT Health Sciences, which added nutrition education into its medical school curriculum in 2018, was highlighted Monday for being among 19 institutions joining the initiative.

"Nutrition is fundamental for any major health outcome that we see," Dr. Snowden said at the press conference. "At the same time, many of our communities that bear the highest burden of these chronic diseases face significant barriers to accessing healthy foods and evidence-based support. It's our job, as the people who train our healthcare providers, to make sure we can bridge that gap."

This is especially true in the rural communities, she continued.

"We recognize the importance of food as medicine for our patients."

"Many of these communities feed America, and yet they don't have access to the kinds of healthy foods, preventative services, and healthcare that they need to make sure they're as healthy as they're providing all of us to be," Dr. Snowden said. "At UT Health Sciences, we've got tremendous enthusiasm among our learners for our current nutrition and educational offerings and culinary medicine programs. Our trainees recognize that helping patients improve their health requires more than just prescribing a medicine, it requires understanding how people live, eat, shop, cook, and care for their families where they are in the communities that they live in."

Dr. Snowden said programs at UT Health Sciences integrate nutrition science, culinary medicine, and lifestyle interventions. "Our learners want more opportunities to develop those skills in culinary medicine, whether it's in our elective or in our many student interest groups across all levels of training and across all of our colleges, because we recognize the importance of food as medicine for our patients," she said.

Dr. Snowden also said the university will partner with other groups in this initiative.

The Rural Health Care Center of Excellence at UT Health Sciences will serve as a key platform for disseminating tools, educational materials, and community-based strategies to improve nutrition-related health outcomes across Tennessee and beyond, she said.

"We're already working alongside state government, health systems, community organizations, local leaders, and our agricultural extension partners across the state to identify practical solutions that improve health where people live," Dr. Snowden said. "If I give you a solution that works in urban D.C., it's not necessarily going to work in small-town Tennessee, and we need to acknowledge that and help people bridge those gaps."

She cited the center's work with the University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture for engaging thousands of Tennesseans across the state in healthy lifestyle and nutrition initiatives in all of the state's 95 of counties.

"These partnerships are essential because lasting improvements in nutrition and health can't be achieved by any one group alone," she continued. "It requires all of us to collaborate across education, across government, across agriculture, public health, and community organizations if we want to make a significant change."

Additionally, she said academic institutions have a unique role to play in improving public health. "One of the things that is most exciting for me about this particular initiative is the opportunity to connect scientific evidence and nutrition education with real-world implementation. As universities, we help generate the evidence that informs what's going to move forward. We train the workforce, we evaluate outcomes to help you figure out what works and what doesn't work, and importantly, we can help you figure out how to scale things so that they are implementable in a variety of communities. Our community partners are equally important because they're the ones who help us guide these solutions to be practical, trusted, and responsive to local needs."