Nutritional Education: a Gap in Medical Training

Introduction:  The role of nutrition in medicine has changed from a passive function, from an adjuvant therapy, to a proactive and sophisticated therapy that prevents various health problems and changes the natural history of the disease. Recent studies show up that medical education does not sufficiently and efficiently address the patient’s nutritional aspects, thus training physicians who are not confident in providing nutritional care to their patients. This study aimed to analyze and describe scientific studies that have evaluated nutrition education in medical schools, seeking within this context to find nutrition topics important for undergraduate medical education.

Methods:  This research was conducted through a cross-sectional, descriptive, scoping review after searching for synonyms using MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) and DeCS (Health Sciences Descriptors) tools.

Results:  We initially found 1.057 publications that underwent sequential screening until reaching a total of 16 articles, which achieved the scope of this research. Most articles are from the United States of America (50%), assessed a total of 860 medical students and 243 medical schools using different approaches regarding the teaching of nutrition.

Final considerations:  In this review, we have shown that despite several studies ratifying the well-established association between nutrition and prevention/treatment of diseases that require outpatient care, or at the hospital level, nutrition education in undergraduate medical school has not accompanied this evidence and, for many years, the subject has been underestimated. In Brazil, no studies were found on this topic with the used descriptors.

Keywords:
Medical Education; Nutritional Therapy; Curriculum; Education; Medical Schools; Nutrition