How RFK Jr. Is Trying to Revamp Medical School

Under pressure from Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., dozens of American medical schools have agreed to rework their curriculums to teach more about nutrition, according to federal officials, records and interviews with medical leaders.

Mr. Kennedy, who has made healthy eating a centerpiece of his campaign to address what he calls an epidemic of chronic disease, has spent months pressuring medical schools to adopt his ideas, threatening funding cuts and promising public recognition.

He is expected to announce this week that many schools are embracing his recommendations — a development that has disturbed some academic and medical leaders who had already been alarmed by the Trump administration’s quest to remake higher education.

Mr. Kennedy’s effort draws on decades of debate about how much America’s doctors should know about nutrition. Many experts in the field have long argued that schools do not teach enough on the topic. But in shaping the new curriculum, the secretary has also tapped into voices and ideas from the Make America Healthy Again movement that sometimes deviate from established science.

“When I first came in I met with the medical schools and I said, ‘We want you to start teaching 40 hours of nutrition,’ ” Mr. Kennedy told his supporters last week at a MAHA rally in Austin, Texas, previewing the initiative before the formal announcement. “We actually developed a curriculum that’s extraordinary. We said, you don’t have to use that. Use whatever you want, teach whatever you want, but you need to teach nutrition.”

Doctors themselves have been arguing for decades that medical schools should include more training in nutrition. In 1962, for instance, the American Medical Association held a conference on the matter, after a report by the group concluded that there was “inadequate recognition, support, and attention given to this subject in medical schools.”