DOCTORS GROUP FAULTS NUTRITION EDUCATION IN MEDICAL SCHOOL

DR. MICHELLE HARRISON, a family physician in Cambridge, Mass., drew laughs last weekend when she told an audience of 450 female doctors meeting in New York about her lack of training in nutrition. Speaking of medical school, she said: ''They had one lecture, on a Saturday morning at 10 A.M., and it wasn't compulsory. I don't remember what was in the lecture because I didn't go.''

The audience reacted with amused recognition because many of the doctors attending the 69th annual meeting of the American Medical Women's Association said they had the same gap in their education. Many of the youngest women in the room - about 150 medical students - said their schools still did not offer much in the way of nutrition courses.

''Nutrition is one of those things you're supposed to pick up by osmosis,'' said Dr. Clair M. Callan of Libertyville, Ill., president of the medical group. ''It is just one of those things you're supposed to know.'' As Dr. Lila A. Wallis, an associate clinical professor of medicine at Cornell University Medical College and one of the meeting's organizers, put it, ''What we have had in the past was the arrogant failure of physicians to admit they don't know.''

Dr. Wallis said training in nutrition was especially important now because of the public's growing concern about food and food additives and because of the large number of what she called cultists who offer nutritional advice to all-too-willing listeners.

In interviews, a number of doctors were asked what their patients wanted to know about nutrition as it related to these and other subjects. Most said the questions generally concerned weight reduction and how to stave off aging. Others said patients wanted to know how to change family diet, whether they should take vitamins, how to eat healthfully in restaurants, whether low-fat diets could really help them avoid cancer and heart disease, and whether certain diets really improved performance in sports.

What should patients be told about nutrition? ''I tell them to start reading books about how to feed themselves,'' Dr. Harrison said. ''I think books and articles are the best way to help them to become informed consumers.''

Other doctors said patients should be told what constitutes a healthy, well-balanced diet and that they can lose weight and keep it off if they follow such a diet; that eating patterns, such as munching junk food while watching television, can be changed, and that they must be alert to nutrition-related health hazards such as vitamin overdoses.

''The future physicians have to look at things more preventively, instead of always relying on drugs,'' said Allison Batchelor, a senior at the Medical College of Ohio in Toledo. ''That's where I think I'll make my greatest impact - through prevention of disease. And good nutrition and prevention go hand in hand.''