Clinical nutrition training consists of two principal elements, didactic learning and clinical exposure. The didactic learning can occur before, during, or after medical school and residency training. It can be acquired in a formal graduate nutrition degree program such as M.S. or Ph.D., as part of a fellowship, or potentially through independent study.  The clinical component must be undertaken after primary residency training is completed. It may occur during a fellowship in nutrition or as a substantial nutrition component of a fellowship in a related subspecialty (principally gastroenterology, endocrinology, critical care medicine, cardiology, or nephrology, although other options may exist). While these settings are likely to offer different emphases, they should all insure that the fellow develops expertise in the care of inpatients and outpatients with a variety of nutrition-related problems, as detailed in IPNEC's Training Standards for Physician Nutrition Specialists  Recommended resources to support both the didactic and clinical components of nutrition training are available in IPNEC's Curriculum Guide .

Detailed information about nutrition fellowship programs, compiled through a survey conducted by the American Society for Clinical Nutrition’s Committee on Professional Nutrition Education, is available on this website under fellowship programs .   ABPNS desires to keep the list current, and therefore invites submission of information about existing fellowship programs, including any that are not currenlty listed. ABPNS also wishes to encourage and facilitate the development of new fellowship programs, and invites persons who are interested in doing so to contact us