 Most deaths in the United States are preventable and related to nutrition. Given that the number one cause of death and the number one cause of disability is diet in this country, surely nutrition is the number one thing taught in medical school. Sadly, that is not the case. Nutrition receives little attention in medical practice and the reason may stem in large part from the severe deficiency of nutrition education at all levels in medical training, writes a group of prominent physicians. After all, a whole food plant-based diet, low refined carbs and animal products, has been proven to reverse heart disease, for example our number one killer, and confer potent protection against type 2 diabetes and cancer to other leading killers. So how has this knowledge affected medical education? Medical students are still getting less than 20 hours out of four years on nutrition, and even most of that has limited clinical relevance. Thirty years ago, only 37% of medical schools had a single course nutrition. According to the last national survey, that number has since dropped to 27%. And it gets even worse after they graduate. Here's the official list of all the requirements for those specializing in cardiology. You have to perform 50 stress tests, participate in at least 100 catheterizations, etc., but nowhere in this 34-page list of requirements is there any mention of nutrition. Maybe they leave that to the primary care docs? In the official 35-page list of requirements for internal medicine doctors, not a single mention of nutrition. There are no requirements for nutrition before medical school either. Instead, those who want to be doctors need to take things like calculus or organic chemistry and physics, most of which is irrelevant to the practice of medicine. So why are they required, mainly to weed out students? But shouldn't we be weeding out based on skills a physician actually uses? The pernicious and short-sighted nature of the process of selection becomes evident when one realizes that those qualities that may lead to success in some pre-medical organic chemistry course, like a brutal competitiveness or unquestioning meticulous memorization, are not necessarily the same qualities we need in competent clinicians. How about requiring a course in nutrition instead of calculus or ethics instead of physics? Despite the neglect of nutrition in medical education, the public considers physicians to be among the most trusted sources for nutrition-related information. But if doctors don't know what they're talking about, they could actually be contributing to diet-related disease. To stem the surging tide of chronic illness in the United States, physicians need to become part of the solution. Yes, there's still much to learn about the optimal diet, but we don't need a single study more to take nutrition education seriously, immediately. It is the low-hanging fruit of health care. Had the knowledge we need for some time, what we need now is the will to put it into practice. By emphasizing the powerful role of nutrition, we could dramatically reduce suffering and needless death. For example, the Million Hearts Initiative. Each year, more than 2 million Americans have a heart attack or stroke, so our government launched a Million Hearts Initiative to prevent 1 million of the 10 million heart attacks and strokes that will occur in the next five years. But why stop at a million, a doctor asked in response. We already have all the information we need to eradicate atherosclerotic disease, our number one killer, which is virtually non-existent in populations who consume plant-based diets. Some of the most renowned cardiovascular pathologists in the world have stated that we just need to get our cholesterol low enough to not only prevent the disease, but reverse it in more than 80% of patients. Opening up arteries without drugs and surgery stabilizing or improving blood flow in 99% of those who choose to eat healthy and clean up their bad habits, essentially eliminating their risk of having a heart attack even in the most advanced cases of heart disease. Nevertheless, these concepts are not even taught in medical school. Instead, the focus is on cutting people open, which frequently provides only symptomatic relief because you're not actually treating the cause of the disease. The solution then is to fix medical education. Knowledge of nutritional excellence can help physicians annihilate the world's leading killer.