Innovations in Medical School Nutrition Education: A Student‐Created Course
Authors: Diamant Carmel , Clarke Emily , Memel Zoe , Chou Sherene , Harlan Gregory 
Published: November 2023

Background

Despite the medical community's acknowledgement of the importance of nutrition there has been an alarming lack of education. This deficiency in nutrition education has created long‐term negative consequences, with students feeling unprepared to counsel patients on the importance of lifestyle management and with physicians lacking the confidence to provide patient education. With the medical community's movement toward preventative medicine, students at the Keck School of Medicine of USC (KSOM) created a nutrition‐based culinary course with a special focus on the local community. We believe this is the most effective way to educate students on the fundamentals of nutrition in order to provide them with the confidence and skill set needed to implement preventative medicine and motivational interviewing into their future patient care.

Key Message

The Culinary Medicine Selective, as part of the Introduction to Clinical Medicine (ICM) course, aims to prepare future physicians to serve, heal, and empower patients and communities through a curriculum that incorporates culinary skill and preventative medicine. In order to engage with the local community, KSOM partnered with L.A. Kitchen, a local non‐profit organization that distributes healthy meals to the elderly and provides culinary training and job placement to people recently released from incarceration or foster care. In collaboration with LA Kitchen, medical students practice culinary techniques as they learn about specific dietary options to treat common diseases. With this knowledge, students can counsel patients on how to create low‐cost, healthy meals on a budget. Class topics include: hypertension, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, grocery shopping on a budget and community outreach. Each class focuses on a specific disease taught from three different approaches: medical (clinical case discussions), nutrition (discussing appropriate diets with each morbidity), and culinary (preparing a meal applying the nutrition lessons just learned). We also include a chef‐guided trip to a grocery store, and a session with several community partner organizations. In order to measure the impact of this course on students' nutrition and culinary knowledge, a pre‐course survey was completed and a post survey will be administered. We anticipate that the survey results will demonstrate how a hands‐on nutrition course can effectively improve students' confidence in lifestyle counseling, nutrition knowledge, and personal culinary skills.

Discussion

A lack of confidence with motivational interviewing and patient education motivated us to seek out new opportunities. As medical students we hold a unique role in the process of medical school curriculum development. We believe that the key to implementing successful nutrition and lifestyle training into our curriculum is through a “ground‐up” interdisciplinary approach that integrates student‐co created materials and courses. Incorporating our East Los Angeles community and focusing our nutrition education on the top three diseases in LA County allows us to gain immediate knowledge and practice that knowledge with confidence. Implementing a hands‐on, community‐based nutrition course provides students with a collaborative approach for promoting their personal health and dietary habits while simultaneously enhancing their confidence and knowledge needed to apply nutrition interventions in the clinical setting.