The Trump administration is angling to overhaul the medical education system by improving nutrition and healthy lifestyle education for physicians and other healthcare providers as part of the Make America Healthy Again agenda.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Wednesday announced that his department, along with the Education Department, is requesting that medical education institutions require nutrition curricula at every stage in the process of becoming a physician.

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“We train physicians to wield the latest surgical tools, but not to guide patients on how to stay out of the operating room in the first place,” Kennedy wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. “We know that when applied properly, nutrition counseling can prevent and even reverse chronic disease.”

Kennedy said Wednesday morning in a video address about the announcement that, although the majority of chronic diseases, such as heart disease and Type 2 diabetes, can be ameliorated with diet and lifestyle changes, only 25% of medical school graduates say they feel confident in advising their patients on nutrition information.

Kennedy said his department is partnering with Education Secretary Linda McMahon to call on “medical schools, residency programs, licensing boards, and assessment and accrediting bodies to overhaul their standards.”

“Future physicians must graduate prepared to prevent disease—by assessing risk, guiding lifestyle change, providing nutritional counseling, educating patients and addressing environmental factors, with nutrition education as the most proven and powerful tool,” Kennedy wrote.

Much of the Trump administration’s strategy in achieving the Make America Healthy Again agenda has been angling to achieve voluntary compliance with policy requests.

So far, that has taken the form of voluntary pledges from food companies to remove petroleum-based food dyes or artificial sweeteners from popular products and securing promises from 80% of the private insurance market to cut red tape in preauthorizations.

Kennedy’s plan for medical education relies upon a similar strategy, saying that medical education organizations “should implement robust and meaningful nutrition requirements” and that accreditors “must then establish new standards.”

In his op-ed and in his video address, Kennedy specifically called for the need to include nutrition education on the MCAT exam for students to get into medical school, which is administered by the American Association of Medical Colleges.

The AAMC, along with the American Medical Association, also sponsors the Liaison Committee on Medical Education, which is recognized by the Education Department as an accreditation authority for medical education programs.

The AAMC did not respond to the Washington Examiner’s request for comment on Kennedy’s op-ed.

Kennedy’s announcement does not address nonvoluntary compliance mechanisms if medical education institutions are slow to change their curricula on the importance of nutrition, but HHS could leverage its position as the primary funder of medical training to achieve its goals.

The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services funds roughly two-thirds of the $20 billion in federal funds allocated for graduate medical education in the United States, mostly through Medicaid.

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The CMS allocates most of those funds to training hospitals for medical residency programs, the postgraduate training doctors receive to specialize in particular fields. Most of the GME fund is allocated toward direct medical education expenses, including salaries for resident physicians, and indirect costs to maintain teaching hospitals and centers.

“We expect public commitments from each organization to make a priority of nutrition education, establish competency-based evaluation tools, and create sustainable faculty-development programs to support these enhanced standards,” Kennedy wrote.