Lifestyle Medicine Insider News and Updates – July 2024

Disclaimer: The information included in Insider is intended to give our readers a sense of what is happening in the news, research journals and other channels related to lifestyle medicine. Inclusion does not imply ACLM endorsement. Note that some links may require registration or subscription.

Of Note

• To mark ACLM’s 20^th anniversary year, Executive Director Susan Benigas wrote “A Milestone: 2024 Marks the 20th Anniversary of the Founding of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine,” published in the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine (AJLM). Celebration of the milestone year will culminate at this year’s annual conference, LM2024, onsite at Rosen Shingle Creek Resort in Orlando, Florida, and online.
• The University of South Carolina School of Medicine Greenville has named ACLM member Phyllis MacGilvray, MD, DipABLM, as dean. To our knowledge, she will be the first lifestyle medicine-certified medical school dean.
• About 40% of new cancer cases among adults ages 30 and older in the United States — and nearly half of deaths — could be attributed to preventable risk factors, according to a new study from the American Cancer Society.
• ACLM founding Advisory Board member and Lifetime Achievement Award recipient John McDougall, founder and director of the McDougall Program, passed away on June 22. He was a leading champion of lifestyle medicine—using food as medicine to treat and even reverse disease. The ripple effect of his health-restoring work will be never-ending.

Economics

• The American Heart Association warns in two new presidential advisories published in Circulation– “Forecasting the Burden of Cardiovascular Disease and Stroke in the United States Through 2050: Prevalence of Risk Factors and Disease” and “Forecasting the Economic Burden of Cardiovascular Disease and Stroke in the United States through 2050” — that the majority of America’s adult population will likely have some form of cardiovascular disease (CVD) in 2050 and that total CVD-related costs will triple to $1.8 trillion.
• A writer for World of Marketing provides statistics projecting prevalence and costs for CVD and other chronic diseases and calls for addressing the root causes and a collective effort to foster a culture of health and wellness.
• The impact of healthy lifestyle factors on lifetime healthcare expenditure using longitudinal individual data is described in a study published in JMIR Public Health and Surveillance.
• Current health coverage policies and practices are ill suited to address the growing burden of chronic disease and will exacerbate health disparities; the Inflation Reduction Act only makes this worse, writes ACLM partner The Partnership to Fight Chronic Disease Chair Kenneth Thorpe, PhD, in Health Affairs.

Women’s Health

• ACLM President Beth Frates is quoted in this Harvard Health article on why women’s bodies require a different approach to post-exercise replenishment and repair.

Military Health

• More than half of active-duty U.S. military installations are located in federally designated primary care shortage areas, NPR reports.

Healthy Aging

• Researchers studying the association of following a healthy lifestyle later in life with a higher likelihood of becoming a centenarian found the major contributors were, in this order: exercising, never smoking and having high dietary diversity. Their findings were published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
• The key finding arising from this examination published in Nature Communications of healthy lifestyle and 10-year cognitive decline was that associations between lifestyle and cognitive decline primarily depended on whether participants reported smoking.
• A new study by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) published by eBioMedicine identifies the key role hydration is thought to play in the aging process.

Lifestyle Psychiatry

• ACLM members Gia Merlo, MD, MBA, MEd, DipABLM, FACLM, and Steve Sugden, MD, MPH, DipABLM, discuss the emerging area of lifestyle psychiatry in this Psychiatric Times article.

Health Equity

• The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM), in its new Ending Unequal Treatment Report, says that law and policy changes aimed at eliminating health disparities have made slow and uneven progress improving racial inequities over the past 20 years.
• STAT discusses effectiveness of food insecurity screening and other social drivers of health in this article. For example, in a draft recommendation, the United States Preventive Services Task Force found no strong evidence that screening for food insecurity in primary care settings improves health outcomes.

Healthy Lifestyle Index

• This study published in Scientific Reports concluded that assessment of the relationship between a holistic composite score reflecting adherence to healthy lifestyle behaviors and the risk of disease and mortality would be improved by utilizing outcome-specific, data-driven versions of the Healthy Lifestyle Index (HLI).

Human-Planetary Health

• This paper published in Frontiers in Nutrition outlines six different approaches for incorporating environmental sustainability into food-based dietary guidelines and the need to raise the ambition of current guidelines.

Position Papers

• The Society for Nutrition Education and Behavior has issued a position paper on the importance of emergency-related food and nutrition education before, during, and after a disaster in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior.
• The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics and the American Council on Exercise have published a position paper in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics on the point that nutrition and physical activity interventions delivered by qualified nutrition and exercise practitioners, within their scopes of practice, can improve lifestyle behaviors and cardiometabolic risk factors for adults in the general population.
  

Chronic Diseases

Obesity

• The United States Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) has published a new recommendation in JAMA Network that clinicians provide or refer children and adolescents six years or older with a high BMI (≥95th percentile for age and sex) to comprehensive, intensive behavioral interventions.
• Despite a high genetic risk for obesity, individuals can prevent obesity-related morbidities by adhering to a healthy lifestyle and maintaining a normal body weight, according to this study published in Cell Metabolism.

Diabetes

• Tufts Food is Medicine Institute Director Dariush Mozaffarian, MD, offers commentary in Diabetes Care to a previously published article on diets and the mechanisms of foods in type 2 diabetes.
• This study published in PLOS found that avoidance of developing type 2 diabetes for at least four years with lifestyle changes can lead to many improvements in the long term, including reducing the risk of death and diabetes-related health complications, such as cardiovascular disease.
• A qualitative study published in The Science of Diabetes Self-Management and Care reported that youth with T2D and their caregivers perceived many benefits of a shared medical appointment (SMA) model and provided feedback to guide the development of a health education curriculum that could be integrated into an SMA clinic. [Note: this is an abstract; access is required.]
  

Cardiovascular Disease

• This article in Nutrients concludes that future research is needed to evaluate the impact of food is medicine approaches to address CVD, but also studies using conceptual frameworks in the implementation of evidence-based dietary guidance, behavioral economic strategies to make the healthy choice the easy choice, and other efforts that address nutrition insecurity.

Pillars

Nutrition

• Published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, research involving 51,700 adults found that over the past 20 years, the average U.S. adult’s diet improved only slightly, with 1.6% of Americans eating an ideal diet.
• A study of diets published in the New England Journal of Medicine suggests that plant-based diets with a moderate lipid content, characterized by the consumption of vegetables, fruits, whole-grain cereals, legumes or pulses, nuts, and unsaturated fats, with low-to-moderate amounts of poultry and seafood and low quantities of red meat and sugar, may offer substantial health benefits.
• While they are processed, meat alternatives are healthier for the heart than the real thing, according to a study published in the Canadian Journal of Cardiology.

Physical Activity

• This review published in AJLM assesses the current evidence around physical activity in natural settings (PANS), strategies for promoting PANS including health professional engagement, and current gaps in the research literature.
• Walking may be the key to prevention of low-back pain, according to a new randomized clinical trial published in The Lancet.
• A year of strength training can provide years of benefits for seniors, according to this study published in BMJ Open Sport & Exercise Medicine.
• “Exercise may be the single most potent medical intervention ever known,” says cardiologist, scientist, and author Eric Topol, MD, in a podcast with Stanford’s new Department of Medicine Chair Euan Ashley, MB, ChB, PhD, in response to this study published in Nature.
• One of the most overlooked aspects of modern medicine, according to Gary Brecka, a prominent figure in the biohacking and health optimization space, is the importance of movement. He discusses this and the impact of other lifestyle pillars on mental health in this Psychology Today article.

Stress Management

• This Verywell Mind article discusses the characteristics, effects, and potential causes of stress and suggests some strategies that can help a person better manage stress levels.

Avoidance of Risky Substances

• Results of new study published in Hypertension support a causal association between alcohol consumption and risk of hypertension, especially above an alcohol intake of 12 g/d, and are consistent with recommendations to avoid or limit alcohol intake. Sex and ethnicity appear to be major effect-modifiers of such association.

Partner News

• ECU Health’s Blue Zones Partnership, led by Christina Bowen, MD, DipABLM, ABOIM, has been awarded the North Carolina Hospital Association’s 2024 Highsmith Award for Innovation.
• Over the last five years, Blue Shield of California’s members have collectively lost 272,880 pounds through its digital weight management programs. Angie Kalousek Ebrahimi, MBA, Blue Shield’s senior director of lifestyle medicine, is interviewed in this Becker’s Payor Issues feature.
• Trinity Health Ann Arbor Hospital’s lifestyle medicine service line in Ypsilanti, Michigan, was highlighted by the Catholic Health Association of the United States in Health Progress through an article written by ACLM member-diplomates Abigail McCleery, MPH, RDN, DipACLM; Lisa McDowell, MS, RDN, DipACLM; and Kelly Wilson, RDN, DipACLM.
• WFMYNews2 in Greensboro, North Carolina, highlighted Cone Health and ACLM member-diplomate Gebre Nida, MD FACE, DipABLM, for helping this patient lose 70 lbs. with a plant-based diet.
• A resident who participated in UConn Health’s new Lifestyle Medicine Track during her residency training is profiled in this UConn Today article.

Members in the News

• Learn more about ACLM member and AMA President-Elect Bobby Mukkamala, MD, in this MedPage Today
• Alka Gupta, MD, DipABLM; Daniel Pino, MD, DipABLM; and Jonathan Bonnet, MD, MPH, CPT, DipABLM, FACLM, DipABOM, CAQSM, were named by the Editors of the American Journal of Health Promotionto its “Twenty Under Forty” list for 2024.
• Sabrina Falquier, MD, CCMS, DipABLM, discusses the six pillars of lifestyle medicine in this YouTube video.
• Stewart Decker, MD, writes about the pillars in this Klamath Falls, Oregon, Herald and News column.
• Harvey Hahn, MD, director of the cardiovascular fellowship training program at Kettering Health in Dayton, Ohio, is profiled in this Adventist Review. Thanks to a grant from the Ardmore Institute of Health, Hahn is leading an effort to train even more providers and promote whole-person care for people in the surrounding communities.
• Lauren E. Vanderpool, MS, DipACLM, writes for the Herzberg Family Wellness Foundation about her experience as an attendee at LM2023, thanks to a scholarship she received.

Podcasts

• Food Tank has highlighted 20 podcasts that focus on food, farming, and sustainability: “Big Sugar,” “Black in the Garden,” “Breaking Waves,” “Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street Radio,” “Gastronomica,” “Farms. Food. Future,” “Food with Mark Bittman,” “Good Food,” “Hot Farm,” “Lecker,” “Longer Tables with Jose Andres,” “Maintenance Phase,” “Pressure Cooker,” “Sustainable Food Trust Podcast,” “The Food Chain,” “The Food Fight,” “The Leading Voices in Food,” “The Rural Woman Podcast,” “The Stephen Satterfield Show,” and “Your Mama’s Kitchen.” You can read more about each of these shows—and learn where you can listen to them—by clicking here.

Food for Thought

• Eminetra Canada provides an interesting lifestyle medicine trends roundup.
• Alan Freishtat, an ACE-Certified personal fitness trainer and wellness coach who often writes in favor of lifestyle medicine, opines in the Jerusalem Post about Dr. Dean Ornish’s recent Alzheimer’s study.
• Multivitamin use does not improve longevity, according to this study published in JAMA Network Open.
• Sam Altman, CEO and cofounder of OpenAI and Arianna Huffington, founder and CEO of Thrive Global, write in Time that AI-driven behavior change could transform healthcare and provide the chance to finally reverse the trend lines of chronic diseases.