Editor’s note –
August 2025

Doctors: one hour’s nutrition training every four years “More than sufficient”

“Make America Healthy Again” is encouraging individual states to get nutrition education into schools, universities, medical schools – and into the brains of healthcare professionals.

Texas, the first to act , set up a Nutrition Advisory Committee to include one doctor certified in functional medicine and “at least one expert in metabolic health, culinary medicine, lifestyle medicine, or integrative medicine”. Great news! New food labelling laws will expose 44 additives legal in the US but banned in the UK and EU. School meals are getting cleaned up. We don’t know how much nutrition training Texas will require of doctors, but doubtless the medics will push back – as they have in Louisiana and New York.

Starting in 2026, physicians and physician assistants in Louisiana will really be challenged (sarcasm). They’ll need to complete a minimum of ONE HOUR of continuing education in nutrition and metabolic health every FOUR YEARS. In New York state it’s going to be THREE hours.

“Our physicians do believe that one hour every four years is more than sufficient”, says Jeff Williams, executive vice president and CEO of the Louisiana State Medical Society. “Physicians, particularly those who are younger, have been receiving nutrition in school and already discuss nutrition with their patients. For them, the challenge may be finding a course that qualifies and is new information”.

Oh dear. Doctors do “receive” nutrition in med school. They get about 3 hours a year for four years. In a 2023 survey, around 58% of MDs said they got NO formal nutrition education while in medical school. In a 2020 study for a BMJ journal, 70% of  UK doctors reported receiving fewer than two hours of nutrition while at medical school.

And yet…everyone agrees with some variation of “Diet-related diseases are the No. 1 cause of death” (University of North Dakota College of Nursing), although one of the UK’s most nutrition-friendly medical schools, the University of Dundee, waters this down to “Nutrition plays a key role in the prevention and management of disease”. Dundee has spent the last 15 years working nutrition into its medical degree and now has its hours up to “a minimum of 30 hours of nutrition focused core teaching”. So… roughly 7 hours a year.

It’s pathetic. Doctors: you’re never going to be experts in nutrition, so why don’t you just leave it to us?

Now all this would be, well, “academic” if the UK population was not suffering because of this deliberate ignorance and misdirection. Hello? We’re in the middle of epidemics of obesity and diabetes. Cancer and heart disease are increasing.

People go to their doctors for help and, to twist the phrase, they don’t know that they (GPs and specialists) don’t know (about nutrition). They don’t know how genuinely useless this makes much of what passes for primary “care” in this country. And in the media they see doctors setting really poor examples. Two this month:

First one, a British doctor on social media promoting the glories of bread. Gluten? Well, who knows, really? You should focus on the “right” sort of wheat, and sourdough is probably the answer. I couldn’t focus on much beyond the fact that she was clearly BMI-challenged….and yet the plaudits rained in from people “freed” to eat more bread.

Second one, TV doctor Hilary Jones: “Why I travelled 180 miles to have my hip operation” all over the media. Dr Jones is 72 and this was his SECOND hip operation. Why does he need two new hips? Osteoarthritis. He’s never had a clue about how to prevent or treat it, he’s just let it go on and then got new ones – while on tv giving health advice. Even worse, he actually believes he’s worn out his joints with too much exercise!…