Lifestyle Medicine Insider News and Updates – March 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.

WH Conference update

• The White House has just announced nearly $1.7 billion in 140 new commitments to its National Strategy on Hunger, Nutrition and Health announced at the Fall 2022 White House Conference. In addition to those highlighted in the news release, this fact sheet provides the full list of other commitments.
• ACLM continues to fulfill its commitment to the National Strategy. As of Mar. 12, there have been 39,061 registrations for our 5.5-hour complimentary “Introduction to Lifestyle Medicine and Food as Medicine Essentials” course. This course, valued at $220 each, is available for up to 200,000 clinicians until September 2025.

Food is Medicine

• A new presidential advisory from the American Heart Association published in Circulation offers an overview of the state of the field of Food Is Medicine (FIM). Among its calls to action is: “Standardize professional education nationally to include nutritional science and FIM research to facilitate adoption of FIM best practices in clinical practice by the next generation of health professionals.”
• Another comprehensive discussion of Food is Medicine, including the need, challenges, and opportunities for medical nutrition education was the subject of a new Journal of the American College of Cardiology State-of-the-Art Review.
• Former Senator Majority Leader Bill Frist has recommendations for food as medicine in medical education in this Forbes opinion piece.
• Note: Since its inception in 2004, ACLM’s unique position is providing this critical education and certification of clinicians to prescribe evidence-based, therapeutic food as medicine (FAM) that science has shown to be efficacious in treating chronic and select autoimmune conditions.  ACLM’s curated repository of FAM CME- and UME-training, as well as related research, is featured at foodasmed.org. ACLM’s Lifestyle Medicine Residency Curriculum (LMRC) is also infusing food as medicine into GME.

Primary Care News

• The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), through the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), announced a new voluntary model called the ACO Primary Care Flex Model (ACO PC Flex Model) that empowers primary care providers in eligible Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) to treat people with Medicare using innovative, team-based, person-centered proactive care.

FDA Updates

• What clinicians need to know about the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) nutrition labeling updates is discussed in this Annals of Internal Medicine paper.
• FDA’s reorganization to create a unified Human Foods Program under one leader who reports directly to the agency’s commissioner may take longer than originally anticipated, but is “going quite well.”

New York

• NYC Health + Hospitals has expanded its lifestyle medicine program to a fifth hospital, NYC Health + Hospitals/Gotham Health, Vanderbilt in Staten Island, accommodating up to 32 new patients monthly. The system has also announced that, in partnership with Sodexo, it has served over 1.2 million plant-based meals since the program began in March 2022.

Occupational and Environmental Medicine

• Integrating the Lifestyle Medicine Residency Curriculum (LMRC) into occupational medicine training is discussed in this Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine article.

Physician Self-Care

• A recent Medscape survey asked US doctors about how they strive for work-life balance and physical and mental health. Here is an infographic profiling their habits as well as the full Medscape Physician Lifestyle & Happiness Report 2024.

Human and Planetary Health

• Delegates of the American Medical Association (AMA) passed a resolution calling for increased regulation of industrialized farms to curb pollution.
• The association of traffic-related fine particulate matter exposure and Alzheimer’s Disease in brain bank donors is discussed in this study published in Neurology.

Remission Metrics

• An ACLM expert consensus statement defining metrics to identify remission following lifestyle medicine treatment has been published in the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine.
  

PILLARS

Nutrition

• Research published in BMJ with an associated editorial and coverage in Washington Post Well involving almost 10 million people has found a direct association between eating too many ultra-processed foods and more than 30 health conditions.
• A detailed analysis published in Nature Communications and reported on by Newsweek of the fasting-mimicking diet proposes that it is a feasible periodic dietary intervention to reduce disease risk factors and biological age.

Sleep

• A large study published in JAMA Open Network found that individuals sleeping fewer than six hours daily had a notably higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes compared with those sleeping seven to eight hours daily. Of note, the increased risk persisted even among adults with healthy eating habits.

Physical Activity

• This study published in BMJ concluded that exercise is an effective treatment for depression, with walking or jogging, yoga, and strength training more effective than other exercises, particularly when intense. Exercise appeared equally effective for people with and without comorbidities and with different baseline levels of depression, and was comparable to psychotherapy and pharmacotherapy.
• A study in the Journal of Physical Activity and Health showed adults working 40 hours or more in high-activity occupations were less likely to report meeting the Physical Activity Guidelines in leisure time than their counterparts in less active occupations.
• In a paper published in the Journal of Molecular and Cellular Cardiology, researchers describe how chronic intake of an omega 6 fat-enriched diet, mainly present in processed food, spikes cardiac inflammation, and how exercise can lower pro-inflammatory bioactive lipid mediators in the heart as well as the spleen. They emphasize the intricate connection of diet, exercise, and inflammation-resolution signaling.
• This study published in Mental Health and Physical Activity investigated the reciprocal nature of the depression–physical activity relationship with reference to lifetime cumulative adversity.

CHRONIC DISEASE

Cancer

• Prostate cancer survivors consuming plant-based diets had better scores for sexual function, vitality, urinary obstruction, and incontinence than those on animal-based diets, study results published in Cancer showed.
• A first-of-its-kind study published in Nature showed evidence for a number of patient and disease characteristics associated with circulating oxysterol concentrations in women with breast cancer.
• The association between long-term elevated metabolic syndrome (MetS) scores and the occurrence of cancers–especially breast, endometrial, kidney, colorectal, and liver cancers–emphasize the importance of long-term monitoring and evaluation of MetS, say the authors of this study published in Cancer.

Macular Degeneration

• The role of nutrition and lifestyle to slow the progression of age-related macular degeneration is discussed in this Optometry Times article.

Dementia

• A study recently published in JAMA Neurology identified 15 risk factors for early-onset dementia, mirroring those for late-onset dementia. This overlap suggests that it may be feasible to mitigate the risk of young-onset dementia by focusing on health and lifestyle factors.

Healthy Aging

• People are living longer lives, but not healthier ones, due to four things, according to this CEO speaking at the recent World Economic Summit in Davos, Switzerland.

Health Equity

• The National Quality Forum (NQF) Leadership Consortium—a body of multistakeholder leaders from NQF member organizations that included ACLM President-Elect Padmaja Patel, MD, DipABLM, FACLM—identified 10 actionable recommendations to help healthcare organizations address health-related social needs.

Women’s Health

• The results of this cohort study published in JAMA Network Open indicated that long-term adherence to a plant-based diet by post-menopausal women was not associated with hip fracture risk.

Workforce Health

• The National Plan for Health Workforce Well-Being from the National Academy of Medicine is intended to inspire collective action that focuses on changes needed across the health system and at the organizational level to improve the well-being of the health workforce.
• A paper about a 12-month study at Emory University published in Nutrients by ACLM members showed that teaching kitchens are a viable and enjoyable means by which employers can increase their employees’ self-assessed general health.

Member News

• Multiple ACLM members authored a review published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings: Innovations, Quality and Outcomes on the evidence and promise of individual lifestyle medicine pillars in addressing modifiable risk factors for diabetes, heart disease, and cerebrovascular disease (specifically stroke and vascular cognitive impairment).
• The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), the organization that oversees more than 500,000 college athletes and virtually all college-level competitive sports, has appointed Mark G. Goetting, MD, DipABLM, to the Committee on Competitive Safeguards and Medical Aspects of Sports.
• Oregon nurse practitioner Lauren Carlson, MSN, FNP, NP-C, DipACLM, was honored by USA Today as one of its Women of the Year.
• Coeurlida Louis Ashby, MD, DipABLM, was interviewed about lifestyle medicine on Sarasota, Florida, television station WWSB’s “Empowering Voices.”
• Gendai Echezona, MD, DipABLM, discusses lifestyle medicine and chronic pain in this Authority Magazine interview.
• Several ACLM members co-authored or authored chapters in this first-of-its-kind book on bringing positive psychology and lifestyle medicine together.

Partner News

• The Physical Activity Alliance is gearing up for its fourth annual Congressional Physical Activity Challenge, an annual competition involving the offices of the U.S. Congress in a bid to achieve the highest level of physical activity. Is your Senator and Representative involved? Here is a fun video from last year’s winner.

Food for Thought

• Patient advocacy organization United States of Care has published results of a multi-part public opinion research project on how to best talk about patient-first care/value-based care in order to emphasize how shifting to this new approach aligns with the ways people want to receive high-quality, affordable health care.