OAN Staff Brooke Mallory
5:01 PM – Monday, June 8, 2026
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Department of Education announced a historic partnership with eight of the nation’s leading medical accrediting, assessment, and board organizations to institute nutrition education requirements.
The agreement, spearheaded by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as part of the Trump administration’s “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) agenda, ensures that nutrition and preventive medicine will move from the periphery of medical training directly into the core licensing processes that govern how physicians are certified to practice in the United States.
Under the newly signed framework, major regulatory bodies — including the National Board of Medical Examiners (NBME), the National Board of Osteopathic Medical Examiners (NBOME), and the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) — have voluntarily agreed to integrate measurable nutritional standards into their processes.
Kennedy revealed that nutrition-based medicine and its clinical applications will soon account for around 15% of the total content across the 3-step U.S. medical licensing examination sequence.
By embedding these standards into the exams required of all prospective doctors, federal officials want to ultimately reorient how future physicians evaluate chronic illnesses — shifting the focus from managing symptoms via pharmaceuticals to addressing dietary and lifestyle root causes.
The announcement also reportedly propped up a massive expansion of the administration’s Nutrition Education Pledge, which calls for medical institutions to mandate a minimum of 40 hours of nutrition education or its competency equivalent over a student’s four-year graduate enrollment.
Nineteen additional medical schools signed the pledge, bringing the total number of participating institutions to 73 out of nearly 160 nationwide. New participants include hubs such as Texas A&M University, the University of Massachusetts, and the University of Maryland.
To evaluate schools choosing a competency-based model rather than a strict hourly requirement, HHS worked with clinical experts to design 71 core competencies across 10 distinct domains, which include interpreting metabolic biomarkers, treating nutrient-deficient states, and forming healthy lifelong dietary patterns for patients with chronic illnesses.
Historically, formal nutrition instruction has been drastically lacking in American medical education, with a 2022 survey publishing that medical students received an average of just 1.2 hours of formal nutrition training per year. Officials also noted that nearly three-quarters of medical schools previously required no clinical nutrition coursework whatsoever.
Dr. Mehmet Oz, Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), emphasized that this “deficiency has long contaminated the medical space by creating a knowledge gap that practicing physicians rarely fill.”
To incentivize ongoing learning for established doctors, Dr. Oz announced that 24 states have secured expanded federal funding through the Rural Health Transformation Fund by agreeing to mandate nutrition education as part of the Continuing Medical Education (CME) credits required to maintain state medical licenses.
While the administration previously hinted at potential funding penalties for non-compliant institutions, officials emphasized that the current agreements are entirely voluntary and collaborative, intentionally leaving the exact curriculum design up to individual universities.
HHS is dedicating $5 million through a multi-phase National Institutes of Health (NIH) nutrition education challenge to fund coursework development and clinical training opportunities.
Meanwhile, leaders from major medical institutions, in addition to the president of the American Medical Association (AMA), have expressed their support for the initiative, agreeing that equipping doctors with baseline tools to prevent diet-related chronic illnesses is a practical and non-political strategy to combat a public health crisis that currently costs the nation an estimated $4.4 trillion annually.
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