Implementing Nutrition and Obesity Curriculums in Primary Care Residency Programs

Abstract Background: Obesity is a significant risk factor for chronic conditions and with its increasing incidence amongst the adult and pediatric populations and its association with a lack of nutrition education, healthcare professionals understand the significance of educating their patients. Integrating nutrition and obesity education into medical school or primary care residency curriculums, such as family medicine, internal medicine, and pediatrics, is likely the most realistic and practical way to increase physicians’ interest, knowledge, and ability to counsel their patients or direct them to specialized providers. Several residency programs tested the integration of nutrition and obesity curriculums and assessed the curriculums’ efficacies by observing a change in residents’ knowledge, clinical behaviors, and attitudes about the importance of obesity and nutrition education. Objective: To evaluate the effect of nutrition and obesity curriculum interventions on primary care residents’ knowledge, clinical behaviors, and attitudes regarding the importance of obesity and nutrition education. Results: Of the 8 studies, 6 noted statistically significant outcomes after the implementation of nutrition or obesity curriculums, including improvement in residents’ knowledge, clinical behaviors, and attitudes about the significance of nutrition and obesity education. Most of the interventions included basic nutrition and obesity education covering topics such as lifestyle therapy, weight-gain prevention strategies, and patient counseling skills. The quality of nutrition and obesity curricular interventions in the literature is limited by dependency on pre-intervention and post-intervention analyses, the variability in intervention composition, and limited use of validated assessment tools. Conclusion: Review of the literature shows that nutrition and obesity curriculums can be successfully implemented within the primary care residency education environment. Further study is needed to determine the optimal length of curriculums, the optimal multidisciplinary team composition for curricular delivery, and the most appropriate measureable outcomes.Master of Public Healt