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By Matthew Rees

Food and Health Fact #101: Doctors' dietary knowledge deficit

Diet was the leading risk factor for death in the United States in the pre-Covid era – and the risks of an unhealthy diet have only been magnified over the past 18 months. Obese individuals have faced disproportionate risks among those who have tested positive for Covid-19.

Physicians are among the most trusted professionals when it comes to providing counsel on dietary issues, yet they are woefully uninformed on the basics of nutrition. A study published last year showed that among more than 300 physicians at the University of Florida, only 25 percent correctly identified the American Heart Association’s recommended number of fruit and vegetable servings per day and only 20 percent were aware of the recommended daily added sugar limit for adults.

Part of the problem is that medical students receive little training in nutrition – less than 1 percent of lecture hours at medical schools, according to one study. And the medical school curriculum, points out David Katz (founder and former director of a research center at Yale), is based on a report issued in 1920, a time when “diseases of nutritional deficiency still prevailed, and the modern diseases of dietary excesses were inconsequentially rare.”

Katz has bemoaned the practice of the media providing platforms for physicians with no expertise in nutrition (physicians without expertise in other medical topics are not given such a platform), as well as the general deficiency in nutritional knowledge among physicians. “For physicians to be ill trained in the very area most impactful on the rate of premature death at the population level is an absurd anachronism.”