To the Editor:
In their article “Nutrition education in an era of global obesity and diabetes: Thinking outside the box,”1 Eisenberg and Burgess discuss the importance of nutrition education in medical school curricula in the United States. They also acknowledge the burgeoning rates of obesity and its associated burden on the health care system. While they do an excellent job of offering “out of the box” solutions to educate medical students about nutrition and lifestyle, nutrition education alone is insufficient to care for the large percentage of the population that already has obesity.2 Though the authors note that the genes cannot explain the dramatic increase in obesity rates over the last 30 years, genes do provide insight into which persons are more susceptible to obesity.3 Most important, epigenetic and transgenerational research is revealing that obesity which is not addressed in adults may be transmitted to the next generation.
Obesity is a complex disease process, but obesity education in medical schools is insufficient.4 Prevention should certainly play a key role in addressing obesity, but equally important is training clinicians to use multiple modalities (e.g., diet, exercise, pharmacotherapy, surgery) to reduce the impact of obesity on people who already have it. Medical schools should begin to recognize obesity as a complex, chronic disease and train clinicians to employ all the tools of chronic disease management that are available.5
Footnotes
Disclosures: None reported.
Contributor Information
Fatima Cody Stanford, Department of Medicine–Division of Gastroenterology, Department of Pediatrics, and Mongan Institute of Health Policy, Massachusetts General Hospital Weight Center; and instructor of medicine and pediatrics, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts.
Theodore K. Kyle, ConscienHealth, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and director, Obesity Action Coalition, Tampa, Florida..
References
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