Clinical nutrition education - relevance and role models

Although Hippocrates recognized the importance of a good diet for the prevention of disease, clinical nutrition has emerged only recently as an important discipline in modern medicine, A uniform curriculum for teaching nutrition to medical students can be adapted for use with postgraduate residents and fellows in the setting of referrals of patients with many common diseases. The prospect that the medical profession will accept clinical nutrition as an essential discipline may be enhanced by the realization that cost-effective medical practice is optimized by wider application of nutrition principles to health maintenance and patient care.