Lifestyle Medicine and Healthy Nutrition

The current issue of the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine focuses on the interaction between lifestyle medicine and healthy nutrition.

This is the latest installment in AJLM, which is part of a multi-year emphasis on healthy nutrition and its role in lifestyle medicine. All practitioners of lifestyle medicine, of course, know that healthy, plant-based nutrition represents a central concept of lifestyle medicine and serves as one of the six pillars of the discipline.

The current issue reflects the wide and diverse impact that modern nutrition principles have exerted across multiple clinical conditions and settings ranging from IBS, depression, anxiety, ¹ low back pain, ² HIV, ³ and type 2 diabetes. ¹ This issue also includes an important article on plant-based nutrition for optimal athletic performance, ⁴ as well as a review on how nutrition impacts on climate change, the environment, and ultimately on mental health. ⁵ There are also articles on medical education and nutrition,^6,7 as well as a thoughtful article on a plant-based nutrition intervention for type 2 diabetes in a primary care setting. ⁸ Taken together these articles illustrate how many areas of lifestyle medicine are impacted by modern understanding of nutrition. This issue also contains an important column from Padmaja Patel the President of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine, where she argues that the Food is Medicine initiative requires a comprehensive lifestyle medicine approach in order to make it worthwhile and effective. ⁹

This nutrition focused issue of AJLM continues to build on the multiple initiatives in healthy nutrition which have been published in AJLM over the past several years. For example, we published reviews of the excellent undergraduate nutrition curriculum, edited by one of our Nutrition Editorial Board members, Melissa Bernstein. ¹⁰ We also published a review of the exhaustive compendium of nutrition and culinary medicine by our newly appointed Culinary Medicine Editor, Dr Shad Marvasti. ¹¹ Both of these individuals were appointed to editorial positions at AJLM during the past year. We have also had the pleasure of appointing Amy Hanus, who is the Director of the Full Plate Living division of the Ardmore Institute of Health, as our regular culinary columnist. ¹² We have benefited from Amy’s culinary insights and delicious recipes in every issue of AJLM for the past year.

While we have made a significant commitment to advancing nutrition on the pages of AJLM, there is still a long way to go. One area where we need to make further inroads is in addressing the paucity of nutrition knowledge amongst practicing physicians. For example, only 20% of medical schools have formal courses in nutrition and 93% of medical school graduates in the United States feel that they do not have adequate training and nutrition. ¹³ The good news in this area is that a significant majority of physicians in a recent survey (78.4%) felt that additional training in nutrition could help them provide better clinical care in the prevention of various chronic diseases, including in cardiovascular disease. ¹⁴

In my other academic discipline of cardiology, it is embarrassing to report that 90% of cardiologists report feeling inadequately trained in nutrition. This results in the problem that they do not have adequate nutritional knowledge when it comes to effectively counseling their patients. ¹⁵ The good news is that 95% of cardiologists would support further training in this area.

My most recent contribution in this area has come through one of the last books that I wrote, which was published as part of our Lifestyle Medicine Series in 2025. The book is entitled Lifestyle Nutrition: Eating for Good Health and Lowering the Risk of Chronic Diseases. ¹⁶ The underlying premise of this book is to provide physicians with general background on modern understandings of plant-based nutrition and how to apply that knowledge to virtually every condition that they see in their clinical practices.

While there has been a considerable ferment in nutrition at AJLM, there are also multiple national initiatives which offer encouraging evidence that nutrition education is gaining increased prominence for medical professionals. For example, the American Medical Association has launched a major nutrition education commitment. ¹⁷ The American Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC) has also launched a multi-faceted program in nutrition education ¹⁸ and issued the following statement: “The AAMC strongly supports flexibility in the ability of its member medical schools to integrate comprehensive, evidence-based curricular content in nutrition across all stages of medical education in alignment with their unique missions and accreditation standards.”

The Teaching Kitchen Collaborative has also experienced exuberant growth and now includes 671 teaching kitchen facilities which have touched the lives of over 130 000 participants. ¹⁹ The prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association in 2024, published an important article with lead authorship from my friend and colleague Dr David Eisenberg entitled “Proposed Nutrition Competencies for Medical Students and Physician Trainees.” ²⁰ The Food is Medicine movement under the excellent leadership of Dr Dariush Mozaffarian continues to gain considerable traction. ²¹

All of these initiatives are highly welcomed and illustrate that the importance of nutrition as a key health consideration will no longer be ignored in American medicine. After all, among the 17 risk factors identified by the U.S. Burden of Disease Collaborators, poor diet is listed as the leading cause premature death and disability in the United States. ²² In American medicine, we can no longer maintain that we practice evidence-based medicine while ignoring the leading cause of premature death and disability. These new initiatives will help reverse this problem!

The time has come to place healthy, plant-based nutrition at the top of our evidence-based pyramid. I believe that major medical associations are beginning to lead the way to make that happen!

Members of the lifestyle medicine community should be proud that our consistent push for the linkage between healthy plant-based nutrition and good health has contributed in a major way toward moving the needle toward recognition of the prominent role that nutrition plays in health. For example, healthy nutrition is one of the key components of the major international initiative from the World Health Organization to combat non-communicable diseases. ²³

I am pleased and proud that the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine continues to provide a forum to publish impactful evidence-based articles on nutrition and health. This is a commitment we take very seriously, and will continue to prioritize moving forward!