Nutrition is a recognized determinant in 3 (ie, diseases of the heart, malignant neoplasms, cerebrovascular diseases) of the top 4 leading causes of death in the United States. However, many health care providers are not adequately trained to address lifestyle recommendations that include nutrition and physical activity behaviors in a manner that could mitigate disease development or progression. This contributes to a compelling need to markedly improve nutrition education for health care professionals and to establish curricular standards and requisite nutrition and physical activity competencies in the education, training, and continuing education for health care professionals. This article reports the present status of nutrition and physical activity education for health care professionals, evaluates the current pedagogic models, and underscores the urgent need to realign and synergize these models to reflect evidence-based and outcomes-focused education.

Undergraduate medical education has undergone significant changes in development of new curricula, new pedagogies, and new forms of assessment since the Nutrition Academic Award was launched more than a decade ago. With an emphasis on a competency-based curriculum, integrated learning, longitudinal clinical experiences, and implementation of new technology, nutrition educators have an opportunity to introduce nutrition and diet behavior-related learning experiences across the continuum of medical education. Innovative learning opportunities include bridging personal health and nutrition to community, public, and global health concerns; integrating nutrition into lifestyle medicine training; and using nutrition as a model for teaching the continuum of care and promoting interprofessional team-based care. Faculty development and identification of leaders to serve as champions for nutrition education continue to be a challenge.

Most health care professionals are not adequately trained to address diet and nutrition-related issues with their patients, thus missing important opportunities to ameliorate chronic diseases and improve outcomes in acute illness. In this symposium, the speakers reviewed the status of nutrition education for health care professionals in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia. Nutrition education is not required for educating and training physicians in many countries. Nutrition education for the spectrum of health care professionals is uncoordinated, which runs contrary to the current theme of interprofessional education. The central role of competencies in guiding medical education was emphasized and the urgent need to establish competencies in nutrition-related patient care was presented. The importance of additional strategies to improve nutrition education of health care professionals was highlighted. Public health legislation such as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act recognizes the role of nutrition, however, to capitalize on this increasing momentum, health care professionals must be trained to deliver needed services. Thus, there is a pressing need to garner support from stakeholders to achieve this goal. Promoting a research agenda that provides outcome-based evidence on individual and public health levels is needed to improve and sustain effective interprofessional nutrition education.

Addressing social inequities has been recognized as foundational to transforming food systems. Activists and scholars have critiqued food movements as lacking an orientation towards addressing issues of social justice. To address issues of inequity, sustainable food systems education (SFSE) programs will have to increase students’ equity-related capabilities. Our first objective in this paper is to determine the extent to which SFSE programs in the USA and Canada address equity. We identified 108 programs and reviewed their public facing documents for an explicit focus on equity. We found that roughly 80% of universities with SFSE programs do not provide evidence that they explicitly include equity in their curricula. Our second objective is to propose an equity competency model based on literature from multiple fields and perspectives. This entails dimensions related to knowledge of self; knowledge of others and one’s interactions with them; knowledge of systems of oppression and inequities; and the drive to embrace and create strategies and tactics for dismantling racism and other forms of inequity. Integrating our equity competency model into SFSE curricula can support the development of future professionals capable of dismantling inequity in the food system. We understand that to integrate an equity competency in our curricula will require commitment to build will and skill not only of our students, but our faculty, and entire university communities.

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