University of Tennessee Health Science Center joins The Advancing Nutrition Education Across the Medical Continuum initiative

The University of Tennessee Health Science Center has joined the Advancing Nutrition Education Across the Medical Continuum initiative of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HSS). The initiative seeks to advance nutrition education in healthcare training by asking participating institutions to implement a minimum of 40 hours of nutrition education in their healthcare training programs. Dr. Jessica Snowden, who is a pediatrician and the UT Health Sciences Vice Chancellor for Research, attended a press conference put on by HHS and spoke to the audience about the initiative.

According to an article on the University of Tennessee Health Science Center’s website, Dr. Snowden is quoted as saying during her remarks, “Nutrition is not a side issue in healthcare, it’s fundamental to many of the things that we need to have a healthy lifespan. Nutrition is fundamental for any major health outcome that we see. At the same time, many of our communities that bear the highest burden of these chronic diseases face significant barriers to accessing healthy foods and evidence-based support. It’s our job, as the people who train our healthcare providers, to make sure we can bridge that gap.”

The initiative encourages healthcare training institutions and medical schools to add a requirement of nutrition education to their curricula. Specifically, the initiative asks that participating institutions begin providing a minimum of 40 hours of nutrition education or a 40-hour competency equivalent starting in the Fall of 2026. UT Health Science Center has been requiring nutrition education since 2018. Currently, 70 institutions in 36 states have joined the Advancing Nutrition Education Across the Medical Continuum initiative.

Dr. Snowden continued, “Many of these communities feed America, and yet they don’t have access to the kinds of healthy foods, preventative services, and healthcare that they need to make sure they’re as healthy as they’re providing all of us to be. At UT Health Sciences, we’ve got tremendous enthusiasm among our learners for our current nutrition and educational offerings and culinary medicine programs. Our trainees recognize that helping patients improve their health requires more than just prescribing a medicine, it requires understanding how people live, eat, shop, cook, and care for their families where they are in the communities that they live in. Our learners want more opportunities to develop those skills in culinary medicine, whether it’s in our elective or in our many student interest groups across all levels of training and across all of our colleges, because we recognize the importance of food as medicine for our patients.”

Snowden pointed to partnerships with The Tennessee Rural Health Care Center of Excellence at UT Health Sciences and University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture, among others, as important to the efforts.

She said, “We’re already working alongside state government, health systems, community organizations, local leaders, and our agricultural extension partners across the state to identify practical solutions that improve health where people live. If I give you a solution that works in urban D.C., it’s not necessarily going to work in small-town Tennessee, and we need to acknowledge that and help people bridge those gaps. These partnerships are essential because lasting improvements in nutrition and health can’t be achieved by any one group alone. It requires all of us to collaborate across education, across government, across agriculture, public health, and community organizations if we want to make a significant change.”

Speaking of her enthusiasm for the initiative, Snowden added, “One of the things that is most exciting for me about this particular initiative is the opportunity to connect scientific evidence and nutrition education with real-world implementation. As universities, we help generate the evidence that informs what’s going to move forward. We train the workforce, we evaluate outcomes to help you figure out what works and what doesn’t work, and importantly, we can help you figure out how to scale things so that they are implementable in a variety of communities. Our community partners are equally important because they’re the ones who help us guide these solutions to be practical, trusted, and responsive to local needs.”

For more information about the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, visit the school’s website.