Nutrition in the Medical Curriculum

There is a clear need for nutrition as a necessary component of education in medicine. The science of nutrition, with its basic and applied components, is very amenable to being introduced into the medical curriculum, both as a vertical as well as horizontal integrated course. Textbooks now emphasize the issue of malnutrition in hospital settings (the skeleton in the hospital closet), and the community aspect of nutrition is equally well known. Why then, is nutrition not accorded its rightful place in the medical curriculum? Is it due to a misplaced consideration that all subjects touch upon nutrition and this serves the purpose of education in nutrition? This is probably the case. It seems critical at this juncture in the country‟s burden of disease, as well as in terms of the mounting costs of hospital care, to create a systematic nutrition training method in the medical curriculum at an undergraduate level. This development should take place against the broader background of the fundamental changes taking place in the undergraduate training of clinicians. The reasons for introducing nutrition into the medical curriculum can be summarized as follows: