What is Lifestyle Medicine?
Lifestyle Medicine is a medical specialty that uses evidence-based lifestyle therapeutic approaches as a primary way to treat individuals with health needs. Care is delivered by clinicians trained and certified in this specialty: to prevent, treat, and often reverse chronic disease. How is Lifestyle Medicine different from standard medical care? Specifically, it addresses the root cause of chronic conditions.
A report on the state of health published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) on the burden of the diseases in the US indicated that of all the risks, dietary risk is the leading cause of death and disability. Additionally, 7 of the top 10 risks are lifestyle-related. Because most modern diseases are caused by lifestyle, changes in lifestyle must be part of the therapy. The scope of Lifestyle Medicine is focusing on and treating the underlying cause of chronic conditions and diseases.
Lifestyle-related diseases represent 80% of primary care visits. For example, some staggering statistics on the prevalence of chronic diseases include the following: 72% of Americans are overweight or obese and 34 million live with type 2 diabetes; 1 in 3 Americans have pre-diabetes, and 90% of them do not know it; 6 out of 10 people are suffering from one or more chronic disease.; and half of all Americans have cardiovascular disease. These health statistics clearly indicate an urgent need for achievable and sustainable health behavior changes.
The positive benefits of a healthy lifestyle are increasing every day. For example, research shows that lifestyle interventions effectively impact disease pathology and improve key health outcomes. A whole-food, plant diet has been found to decrease the rates of cardiac events and of cardiovascular disease by 25%. Intensive therapeutic lifestyle changes resulted in significant reductions in LDL cholesterol and angina episodes at 1 year and additional coronary artery disease regression after 5 years. In contrast, patients receiving usual care showed progression of coronary artery disease after 5 years.
Improvement and even remission of type 2 diabetes is feasible using lifestyle interventions as the primary therapy. 90% of patients with type 2 diabetes with a plant- based eating pattern decreased or discontinued their glucose lowering medication in just 7 days. Physical activity has been shown to improve insulin resistance and beta cell function.
Lifestyle behaviors are, therefore, the most modifiable determinants of positive health outcomes. Additional information about lifestyle medicine impact on key health outcomes can be found here: www.lifestylemedicine.org.
References
American College of Lifestyle Medicine Accessed December 2023.
National Center for Health Statistics, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics. accessed July 2023.
Ornish D, Brown SE, Scherwitz LW, et al. Can lifestyle changes reverse coronary artery disease? The Lifestyle Heart Trial. Lancet. 1990;336:129-133.
McDougall J, Thomas LE, McDougall C, et al. Effects of 7 days on an ad libitum low- fat vegan diet: the McDougall Program cohort. Nutr J. 2014;13:99.
Kelly J, Karlsen M, Steinke G. Type 2 diabetes remission and lifestyle medicine: A position statement from the American College of Lifestyle Medicine. Am J Lifestyle Med. 2020;14:406-419.
Embracing a healthy lifestyle, especially a whole-food, plant-based diet and regular exercise, can profoundly transform your health, dramatically reducing risks of cardiovascular disease, LDL cholesterol, angina, and type 2 diabetes, and often achieving results beyond traditional treatments.