Stories & Articles
Lifestyle Medicine
The Benefits of Plant-Based Nutrition
In this first article in a special 11 part series ACLM presents the evidence supporting the benefits of a whole food, predominantly plant-based diet to prevent and reverse disease in multiple clinical settings.
The Benefits of Plant-Based Nutrition: Longevity and Quality of Life
Research indicates that a plant-based diet consisting of unrefined plant-based foods is the cornerstone of healthy longevity and may be the most important prescriptive tool to help patients achieve a longer life and better quality of life as they age.
The Benefits of Plant-Based Nutrition: Treatment and Prevention of Chronic Kidney Disease
Whole food, plant-based diets offer two advantages for prevention and treatment of CKD. First, higher consumption of plant foods are protective against the disease; second, lower consumption of animal and higher protein foods reduce renal burden.
The Benefits of Plant-Based Nutrition: for Enteral Nutrition
Nutrition is essential in disease prevention during recovery and recuperation of acute or chronic illness. Plant-based enteral nutrition options offer a safe alternative to standard enteral formulas and may help to avoid bloating and diarrhea.
The Benefits of Plant-Based Nutrition: Treatment and Prevention of Reproductive Cancers
Whole food, plant-based diets may decrease risk for reproductive cancers and potentially reduce rates of reoccurrence. Evidence on plant-based diets can be communicated to patients to support their ability to make informed decisions course of treatment.
The Benefits of Plant-Based Nutrition: Treatment and Prevention of Type 2 Diabetes
Plant-predominant diets are associated with decreased risk of developing T2D across all age and sex categories. Even small amounts of meat consumption have been shown to increase the risk of developing diabetes.
The Benefits of Plant-Based Nutrition: Treatment and Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease
Populations consuming diets of whole plant foods have better cardiovascular risk profiles and lower rates of cardiac events and mortality. Lifestyle medicine practitioners should encourage patients to adopt a whole food, predominantly plant-based diet.
The Benefits of Plant-Based Nutrition: Treatment and Prevention of Autoimmune Disease
Unlike traditional pharmaceutical treatments that can be costly and produce side effects, treatments involving plant-based nutrition are cost-effective, safe, and have strong potential to improve multiple health outcomes including autoimmune diseases.
The Benefits of Plant-Based Nutrition: Diet Quality
Plant-based diets can address poor diet quality by providing essential macronutrients, micronutrients and fiber. This article reviews the essential nutrients for optimal health and the ability of plant-based diets to adequately meet recommendations.
The Benefits of Plant-Based Nutrition: Obesity & Weight Management
Individuals consuming more plant-based diets have lower rates of overweight and obesity than those whose diets include or emphasize meat and refined foods.
How One Physician Rediscovered Her Passion Through Lifestyle Medicine
Endocrinologist, Mahima Gulati, MD, DipABLM, FACLM, was at her lowest point when a chance encounter transformed how she approached medicine–and her own life.
What Every Lifestyle Medicine Provider Must Add to Their Root-Cause Focus
As we observe February’s dual Heart Health and Black History months, Dr. Columbus Batiste, issues an important call for the implementation and development of lifestyle behavior change treatment plans to address the alarming trends in health disparities.
HEAL Scholarship Helps Heal Communities One Physician at a Time
The HEAL scholarship was created to provide an avenue for BIPOC healthcare professionals to explore lifestyle medicine as a specialty and help diversify the lifestyle medicine workforce.
Avocados and Cardiovascular Health Research
ACLM CRT member, Love One Today, an initiative to advance awareness and understanding of the nutrition research on avocado consumption, is empowering lifestyle medicine by providing resources that make it easy for health professionals help patients who want to improve their health and make diet-related lifestyle behavior changes with healthy foods like avocado.
“I can manage my health!”
Addressing each patient’s diabetes is more in-depth than a standard diagnosis. Instead, residents and attending physicians educate patients about evidence-based lifestyle medicine that, if prescribed intensively, could reverse their diagnosis.
Open-source Lifestyle Medicine Curriculum Available to All Medical Schools
The University of South Carolina School of Medicine Greenville (SOMG), in partnership with the American College of Lifestyle Medicine (ACLM), offers its Lifestyle Medicine Education (LMEd) curricular resources free to other medical and health professional schools.
Humana Commits to Lifestyle Medicine Training for Healthcare Professionals
ACLM and Humana have announced a new partnership to provide lifestyle medicine training for healthcare professionals contracted by Humana. The partnership with Humana represents the largest organizational commitment to promote lifestyle medicine training to date.
ACLM to Honor Dr. Liana Lianov with Trailblazer Award
ACLM to Honor Dr. Liana Lianov with Trailblazer AwardThe Lifestyle Medicine Trailblazer recognizes an individual who is currently providing leadership in the field of lifestyle medicine, helping strengthen the foundation laid by others, while advancing it through innovation. "It's a wonderful honor to receive this award from the American College of Lifestyle Medicine and serve with this group of...
A doctor discovered she was genetically predisposed to cancer. Now she inspires others to believe genes don’t equal destiny.
A doctor discovered she was genetically predisposed to cancer. Now she inspires others to believe genes don’t equal destiny. “The everyday things that we all do in our lives — the way we eat, the way we move, the way we think — have so much of a bigger impact on our health and wellbeing than we are often led to believe.” - Dr. Simran Malhotra Simran Malhotra was 26, close to finishing her...
ACLM Makes $22 Million Commitment to Provide Free Lifestyle Medicine Training
ACLM Commits $22 Million to Free Lifestyle Medicine Training "The continuing medical education courses ACLM is making available to 100,000 physicians and other medical professionals is a major step in helping those providers develop the strong foundation they need to integrate lifestyle medicine into their practices and to partner with their patients to assist them in achieving their health...
ACLM to honor Jack and Elaine LaLanne and Dr. Kenneth Cooper for lifetime achievement
The Lifetime Achievement Award is the highest honor bestowed on a lifestyle medicine health care pioneer. This award recognizes an eminent and influential body of work over a significant span of time that advanced the field of Lifestyle Medicine; and, in the process, paved the way for others to follow.
Hispanic Health
During Hispanic Heritage Month, we are reminded of how lifestyle-related chronic diseases disproportionately affect historically under-resourced communities.
Curbing childhood obesity one family habit at a time
Dr. Qadira Huff grew up in a medically under-resourced neighborhood known as “East of the River” in Washington D.C. Today the pediatrician is using lifestyle medicine to help families there break cycles of chronic disease.
Intelligence Brief: LM Addressing Health Equity
This brief will 1) evaluate the promise of, and need for, health equity; 2) explain what lifestyle medicine is and why it is high- value care; 3) share how provider organizations can deliver lifestyle medicine both through their own processes and through community partnerships; and 4) present some of the challenges to widespread adoption of lifestyle medicine and how those challenges can be addressed.
ACLM leaders bringing lifestyle medicine to family medicine
In their ongoing effort to integrate lifestyle medicine into family medicine, Drs. Rea, Polk and Mechley will co-chair a live CME-eligible lifestyle medicine training May 17-19 for the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP).
Can paying doctors more for making patients healthier transform primary care?
A hospital system in Appalachia believes lifestyle medicine could be key to making the Medicare payment model Primary Care First successful.
Five things you can do to eat healthier on a tight budget
Inflation is straining household budgets but there are many low-cost, nutritious and tasty food options that health clinicians can explore with patients as part of a lifestyle medicine treatment plan.
There is a growing threat to our national security. It’s probably not what you think it is.
A quiet threat to United States national security is infiltrating the health and wellness of the brave men and women who serve.
The growing epidemic of chronic disease in the U.S. has not spared the armed forces, where almost 66 percent of service members are considered to be either overweight or have obesity.
Lifestyle medicine helped save this physician from burnout.
I was 32, seeing about 30 patients a shift for Yale New Haven Health. I liked my job — the adrenaline rush from saving a life is medicine’s ultimate reward. But 80 to 85 percent of the diagnoses I made were straightforward, not immediate life-threatening events or complicated medical dilemmas to solve.
How a commitment to lifestyle changes helped one woman face cancer.
“Terri Schon’s cancer diagnosis in 2019 left her with a nagging question she will never answer.
Why?
Cancer didn’t run in her family. She had no reason to believe it was genetic. She couldn’t stop wondering if there was something wrong in her lifestyle that caused the disease.”
How a Mayo Clinic doctor who survived stage 4 cancer and a heart transplant inspires patients.
“Dr. Mussallem, a breast cancer and lifestyle medicine specialist, comes to appointments prepared with scientific evidence backing up why healthy lifestyle choices matter when it comes to breast cancer prevention and management care.
Her patients are experiencing a range of emotions that accompany a breast cancer diagnosis and subsequent treatments like chemotherapy, radiation and surgery. Fear. Confusion. Determination.
‘But patients welcome the opportunity to seize a sense of control over their disease and embrace the six pillars of lifestyle medicine'”
Communities besieged by chronic diseases need lifestyle medicine. Meet a doctor determined to deliver it there.
“Margarita Schneider-Munoz was in her early 20s when a nurse practitioner reviewing her family medical history shook her head and said something Schneider-Munoz never forgot.
‘I am so sorry,’ the nurse practitioner told her.
She was referring to a family history reflecting that Schneider-Munoz’s grandmother was diagnosed with breast and ovarian cancer in her mid-40s, and that Schneider-Munoz’s father suffered his first heart attack while also in his 40s. The nurse practitioner meant well but her message was clear: Schneider-Munoz was destined to a life of sickness.”
Lifestyle medicine works. So why can’t physicians get paid to practice it?
“As a passionate advocate for lifestyle medicine, Padmaja Patel, MD, DipABLM, knows many clinicians committed to practicing the fast-growing field and dedicated to restoring their patients’ health through proven, evidence-based treatments.
But they struggle with financial unsustainability in a system geared more toward “sick care.”
The predominant U.S. fee-for-service health care reimbursement model rewards clinicians for how many procedures and services they perform, not for making their patients healthy again.”
A health message so simple and effective that everyone should be doing it
Kaiser Permanente Dr. Sean Hashmi believes that evidence-based lifestyle medicine gives patients a sense of health ownership that medications and procedures cannot.
“Your results are normal!” The story of how one woman with diabetes and chronic fatigue restored her health
A team of health experts in the St. Luke’s Health System Lifestyle Medicine Department helped Deena Clark make lifestyle behavior changes that relieved her body’s stress.
“Lifestyle medicine is the most positive thing happening in the medical space”
Mayo Clinic nephrologist and genetics researcher Dr. Stephen Turner discovered lifestyle medicine late in his career. That didn’t stop him from becoming one of its most passionate advocates.
Featured Continuing Education Offerings
We invite you to explore our ever-growing educational offerings, and the key events and conferences which keep our members at the cutting edge of lifestyle medicine and its clinical applications.
Remission of Type 2 Diabetes & Reversal of Insulin Resistance
Worldwide, Diabetes is a Leading Cause of Morbidity and Mortality
Yet, there is a safe, powerful and cost effective treatment and it's time every patient, and clinician knows
Physician and Health Professional Well-being
This course pairs a unique perspective on personal and organization wellness with a practical approach and useful supporting materials, that can build a well-being mindset and improve work life balance for yourself and others around you.
