Improving nutrition components in medical and dental school curriculums.

This article has presented an alternative approach to the traditional, freestanding, concentrated course in nutrition. The integration of nutrition into other courses, with continuous reinforcement throughout the 4-year curriculum, may result in better learning and retention by the student. However, the lack of an accurate curriculum representation presents a problem in selecting topics that integrate with other courses. The unobtrusive approach to nutrition curriculum improvement involves three key points: development of the Nutrition Curriculum Guide, which provides detailed information on what is currently being taught, comparison of what is actually being taught with a set of ideal objectives in order to identify redundancies or omissions, and orchestrating the efforts of faculty in courses throughout the 4-year curriculum to help students integrate nutrition-related topics from the various disciplines. When one makes practical application of the unobtrusive approach, the most difficult problem is defining which interdisciplinary topics are currently being taught. An education specialist and the Tracer Method are important resources for one who is seeking to ameliorate the problem.