Doctors are biased against higher-weight patients. Can nutrition education help them change?

Everyone agrees that diet is important to good health. And yet fewer than a third of medical students receive the recommended minimum of 25 hours of nutrition education, and more than half report receiving no formal education on the topic at all. 

That’s why health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. may be pushing on an open door with his plans to require medical schools to include nutrition education in their curricula or else lose federal funding. 

For Christina Roberto, director of the Center for Food and Nutrition Policy at the University of Pennsylvania, the main value of mandatory nutrition education lies in the opportunity to tackle the subject of weight bias and to help doctors understand why it’s important to refer certain people — a patient with type 2 diabetes or someone who’s taking a GLP-1 weight loss drug — to registered dieticians and nutritionists who can help them plan optimal diets for their specific situations.