Prof. James Field
Academic in Cardiff University
United Kingdom
Many of us will remember spending hours and hours learning the biochemical pathways of the human body – ATP, NADPH, and many pathways, bi-products, enzymes and co-enzymes. It’s enough to put anyone off the subject for life. My previous degree, before Dentistry, was Zoology – and a large part of this was the biochemistry behind the metabolic pathways – and how diet played a major role. However, it was only when studying it within a real context as a Dental student, that I began to rationalize and understand why it has the potential to be a critically important subject. Since that time, (and that was quite a while ago!), there have been many advances in the understanding of how nutrition impacts on wider bodily health, and bodily functions. We now know much more about how it links directly with chronic inflammation – not least of relevance to the periodontal tissues. Dietary habits clearly have a direct impact on whether our patients suffer from pre-diabetic or diabetic tendencies – and how well they manage diabetes and other systemic conditions. New breakthroughs in understanding are able to explain how essential fatty acids and carbohydrate and protein intake can impact on periodontitis and other inflammatory conditions.
The fact is, though, that nutrition isn’t a trendy topic. We’ve had exemplary texts on this subject calling for inclusion in medical and dental curricula for nearly 100 years – but little has gained traction. A recent paper by Michale Crowe & Paula Moynihan explains how nutrition should be a core subject in oral health curricula – and yet most dental programmes do not include it. In this paper, the team provided a short course (14 lectures) delivered by food scientists, nutritionists and dieticians, to second year dental students. Afterwards, 95% responded that they felt that a good understanding of nutrition was important for a dentist.
If you are interested in bringing this into your local curriculum, then I would urge you to take a look at the paper – which lists the topics that were delivered as part of the programme. Michael is also running a Community of Practice within ADEE which will be meeting in Leuven in September – and this is a great chance to find out more about the CoP, and getting involved.
Finding experts to deliver these may be a challenge – but there is little doubt that our students (and the environment in which they work) would benefit from a multidisciplinary approach – and it’s also a great opportunity to develop Interprofessional Education opportunities. At Cardiff Dental School we’ve recently developed an IPE initiative in collaboration with neighbouring universities and health boards, to allow our students from all oral health programmes to join in a multidisciplinary screening initiative – where students from allied health professions screen patients for multiple co-morbidities. Dietetics is very much part of the process – and I hope that we see this discipline grow and integrate further into oral health programmes across Europe.
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