Nutrition in medical education: Beginnings within a medical school

School of Medicine Greenville at the University of South Carolina opened its doors with an emphasis on lifestyle medicine. Jennifer L. Trilk, PhD, FACSM, DipACLM, is a professor of biomedical sciences and director of the Lifestyle Medicine Program there. Here she discusses the origin of that educational requirement as the school started.

Trilk is a co-author of “Proposed Nutrition Competencies for Medical Students and Physician Trainees: A Consensus Statement,” published in JAMA Network Open. The authors’ goal was to recommend nutrition competencies in medical education to improve patient and population health. She is the co-founder of the Lifestyle Medicine Education Collaborative, which has published free medical education curriculum materials on lifestyle medicine.

Jennifer L. Trilk, PhD, FACSM, DipACLM: Nutrition has been interwoven into my career and into my personal life for many, many years. I did my postdoc at Arnold School of Public Health at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, and I was doing a fellowship there, when I heard that the medical school was opening in Greenville, and asked if I could have an audience with the then founding dean, Jerry Youkey, MD, wonderful, wonderful man, and he wanted to have a very different, very innovative medical school. And when we talked, and he was a retired vascular surgeon, he saw the downstream effects of poor lifestyle behaviors, and different socioeconomic status, and and how people had access to fresh fruits and vegetables and good nutrition, and, safe walking spaces and physical activity, and he really understood that caring for patients upstream of having to have surgeries for peripheral artery disease or cardiovascular disease, what have you, was really, really important to train with our doctors. So being a new school of thought, I was hired to bring in prevention-oriented training from a very evidence-based perspective of nutrition, physical activity, sleep hygiene, social connectivity, avoidance of risky substance use, and also bringing in resilience and stress reduction to our medical school. And from the time that we opened our doors in 2012, we started with four hours of exercise physiology in the very first year. The second year, I had an additional two hours, as we built the second year, I had an additional two hours with the now second year class in lifestyle medicine and cancer, and I was able to go into the intercellular mechanistic pathways on how poor diet and sedentary behavior causes downstream effects of cancer progression and promotion, and we were really off to the races after that. So now we're in 2025, we have 106 hours of required nutrition and lifestyle medicine content across all four years of our undergraduate medical school curriculum. We also were certified as a Platinum Plus medical school from the American College of Lifestyle Medicine in 2024 and we've also received the United States President's Council on Sports, Fitness and Nutrition Community Leadership Award for our lifestyle medicine curriculum, and that was under President Trump in 2019.