STAT+: A Harvard course seeks to put food on the table in medical education
As movements promoting food as medicine gain traction, many medical students want to know about nutrition more than their programs offer them.
BOSTON — Doctors often don’t have a lot of time to chat with patients during medical appointments — which means that conversations about nutrition can wind up taking a backseat to other concerns. But during a recent weeklong course at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, preventive cardiologist Stephen Devries enlisted two dozen students in the mission to integrate nutrition into clinical medicine — changing the way medicine is taught and health care is delivered in the process.
“As a cardiologist, I can attest to the fact that nutrition is vastly underutilized in medical practice,” Devries told STAT. “I saw the end result of disease that in many cases could have been prevented or the severity lessened, had more attention been paid to nutrition and lifestyle.”
In the classroom on this chilly January day in Boston’s Longwood Medical Area, Devries spoke with students about success stories like hospital teaching kitchens, which take a hands-on approach to tailoring meals to patients’ health needs and their access to healthy food, and the Diabetes Prevention Program, which has a combined approach to healthy diet and exercise that demonstrates how effective those interventions can be.
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