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Introduction. Medical Students experience high levels of stress throughout their four years. When the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated this, there was a need for programming and this created an opportunity to provide a whole person, lifestyle medicine approach to enhance medical student wellbeing. Methods. Two student leaders and one faculty member created a 12-week program that addressed the 6 pillars of lifestyle medicine as well as positive psychology. The program was offered to all first year students, and within 12 hours the roster was full with 15 students. The program was held weekly by Zoom for 1-2 hours. Results. Attendance was high each week with full participation from everyone present. In the post program evaluation form, conducted one year after completion of the program, 100% of respondents reported they would recommend this group to another medical student, 71% reported they used tools learned from the group at least weekly. Participants noted that growth mindset, gratitude, mindfulness, priorities, and relationship building were the most used well-being strategies learned in the program. Conclusion. An intervention that is based on the 6 pillars of lifestyle medicine and positive psychology and presented by Zoom is feasible in medical school and well accepted by medical students.

Purpose: High-value care is becoming increasingly important as the United States shifts toward a more sustainable health care system. Lifestyle medicine (LM) may be the highest-value model of care. Surprisingly, however, it is taught in a minority of medical schools. In this article, we describe a pilot project of introducing a brief LM course taught within the Mayo Clinic Alix School of Medicine in Arizona. The main purpose of the course was to introduce the students to LM as a specialty practice and to provide students with foundational knowledge of the pillars of LM. Results: Students reported improved personal health habits and increased confidence in LM competencies.

Providing a strong foundation in culinary medicine (CM)—including what constitutes a healthy diet and how to find, obtain, and prepare healthy and delicious food—is a cornerstone of educating health professionals to support patients in achieving better health outcomes. The Culinary Medicine Curriculum (CMC), published in collaboration with the American College of Lifestyle Medicine, is the first, comprehensive, open-source guide created to support the implementation of CM at health professional training programs (HPTPs) worldwide. The CMC is modeled after the successful CM elective course for Stanford University School of Medicine students. Key goals of the CMC include presenting healthy food as unapologetically delicious, quick, and inexpensive; translating lessons learned to healthy eating on-the-go; practicing motivational interviewing on healthy dietary behavior changes; and demonstrating how to launch a CM course. The CMC highlights a predominantly whole food, plant-based diet as seen through the lenses of different world flavors and culinary traditions. It was developed, published, and distributed with the aim of expanding CM by reducing barriers to creating CM courses within most types of HPTPs and practice settings. During the first 2 months the CMC was available, it was downloaded 2379 times in 83 countries by a wide variety of health care professionals interested in teaching CM. The global interest in this first, freely available, evidence-based CMC underscores the demand for CM resources. Such resources could prove foundational in expediting development of CM courses and expanding the reach of CM and counseling on dietary behavior changes into patient care.

Chronic diseases, previously thought to require decades of risk factors, have become increasingly prevalent in America’s youth. National Health Education Standards have been published since 1995, and yet nearly a fifth of schools fail to follow any state or national health education guidelines. Utilizing the phrase “lifestyle medicine” in childhood would elevate the importance and standardization of the core health guidelines. Several independent pilot programs taught by undergraduate and medical student volunteers have successfully demonstrated lifestyle medicine education models at intermediate and secondary schools. Preliminary feedback demonstrates that student interest in and consideration of behavioral change is possible within this age group. As with any life stage, significant behavior change in youth requires strategic planning of authentic learning practices and culturally competent lessons. We argue for the interdisciplinary development and implementation of community-engaged lifestyle medicine education for intermediate and secondary schools as a promising intervention to address and reverse the chronic disease trend in our youth.

Despite a growing interest in lifestyle medicine, students at most medical schools in the United States are not receiving enough nutrition education and training in the principles of lifestyle modification to be effective at applying this knowledge to real-world clinical practice. Moreover, the rising prevalence of chronic lifestyle-related diseases and the increasing deficit of primary care providers is overwhelming the US health care system. The need for primary care physicians is being circumvented by medical students’ diminishing interest in primary care partly due to concerns about salary, prestige, and being too broad in focus. Students may also recognize that the pharmaceutically based management of chronic conditions and supplemental lifestyle recommendations are often fraught with nonadherence, resulting in the progression of disease states. However, some medical schools have incorporated the concepts and practice of lifestyle medicine into their curriculums. This integration has the potential to inspire medical students to choose a primary care specialty, because students become more adept at addressing and treating the root causes of chronic disease. Lifestyle medicine education can empower students interested in primary care to fulfill their initial desires to treat and heal that may have inspired them to want to become doctors in the first place.

Lifestyle medicine domains, despite accounting for more than 78% of chronic disease risk, are infrequently taught as a part of the medical curriculum. Aspects such as nutrition are taught in less than 25% of medical schools, a statistic that continues to decline, and less than 20% of practicing physicians were required to take even a single course in exercise counseling during their medical school training. To combat this lack of training, the American College of Lifestyle Medicine annually awards the Donald A. Pegg scholarship to fund the development of Lifestyle Medicine Interest Groups (LMIGs) across medical schools worldwide. This scholarship was initiated in 2016 and utilizes private funds to support the development and expansion of LMIGs with the aim of increasing awareness of lifestyle medicine among training practitioners. There are four award winners per year. To date there are sixteen Pegg Award winners. This article will showcase the four 2019-2020 Donald A. Pegg award recipients and their impact on the LMIGs at their institutions. Furthermore, it highlights the ingenuity and adaptation of these LMIGs during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Significant contributors to rising health care costs are diseases influenced by lifestyle, such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and cancer. Unfortunately, American medical education devotes disproportionately little time training future doctors in prevention. Approach. With the support of medical education leadership, medical students collaborated with a faculty advisor at Wake Forest School of Medicine to test the feasibility of a broad-based, student-led lifestyle medicine curriculum. After 3 introductory sessions delivered to an entire medical school class, a smaller pilot series with 16 first-year medical students was held after-hours, featuring experiential learning in nutrition and cooking, physical activity, and sleep. The 8 modules were designed to improve student health, wellness, and knowledge of health behaviors. Feedback. The program was implemented into the first-year medical school class. An unforeseen benefit of the pilot was increased student volunteering in community-based wellness activities and research. Two components of success were the hands-on, experiential modules and being student-led. Details on curriculum development, schedule, and content are provided.

Lifestyle medicine has the power to reverse the growing burden of chronic disease that now plagues our health care system. The World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the American College of Lifestyle Medicine have all independently recognized the need for community-centered lifestyle medicine education as a means of empowering individuals to take charge of their own health. Students in undergraduate, medical, and allied health schools may serve as mediators for these conversations. With guidance from faculty lifestyle medicine mentors, these students can operate as peer educators in primary and secondary schools to supplement current health teaching with the core tenants of lifestyle medicine: nutrition, exercise, sleep, mental and social well-being, and substance avoidance as strategies to prevent and treat chronic disease. We present models of two such student-led programs working with middle and high school students in Massachusetts and New Jersey. Both programs have found success by engaging middle and high school students in interactive workshops and by responding to their individual interests and community needs. We share our currently available resources and, moving forward, hope to publish a tested curriculum that students around the country can implement in their communities to promote lifestyle medicine.

Traditional nutrition education in medical school has been inadequate to prepare future physicians to counsel patients on practical dietary changes that can prevent and treat food-related disease. Culinary medicine is being used to address this in a variety of settings, including medical education. The Teaching Kitchen Elective for Medical Students at Stanford University School of Medicine spans 1 academic quarter and combines hands-on cooking of food that is delicious and healthy, correlations with multiple clinical specialties, and role-playing real-life examples of brief dietary counseling with patients to make nutrition education practical and approachable. The course has been run as a quasi-randomized controlled study comparing 3 cohorts of students versus wait-listed controls via precourse and postcourse surveys. Preliminary analysis of the first cohort of students shows significant improvements in attitudes, knowledge, and behaviors around healthy cooking and meal planning for the students compared with controls. Despite these promising preliminary results, more resources are needed to be able to hold the course frequently enough to meet student demand.

It is well established that evidence based clinical nutrition and lifestyle practices play a pivotal role in the prevention, treatment and potential reversal of various common chronic diseases. However, this area of science is under appreciated at all levels of medical education and training. Most medical schools and residency programs do not offer any organized training in nutrition and lifestyle medicine. Given recent data on the rising cost and loss of quality of life secondary to preventable causes, there is an absolute need for a drastic reform of the US medical education system.

Lifestyle medicine (LM) is now recognized as a first-line treatment and disease reversal program for many chronic diseases. More providers are encouraged to prescribe lifestyle treatments, yet lack of training, inadequate time, and poor reimbursement hinder many physicians from actually following through, and few LM specialists are available for counsel or referral. With great strides in resolving these dilemmas, the American College of Lifestyle Medicine has created standards and competencies, and the American Board of Lifestyle Medicine will be holding its first exam for certification in LM in October 2017. Still no residency or fellowship program exists to train providers to become LM specialists. This article describes one physician’s journey through an unaccredited fellowship in lifestyle medicine at Black Hills Health and Education Center under Dr John Kelly, founding president of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine. Highlighting the differences of her lifestyle medicine training from her prior primary care and preventive medicine training, the author advocates for the formation of an accredited LM training program in intensive lifestyle medicine interventions.

NextGenU.org now uniquely offers a free, accredited, globally-available online training in Lifestyle Medicine. Courses such as Lifestyle Medicine for Primary Care Physicians, Prevention and Treatment of Alcohol Use Disorders/Tobacco Use, Substance Use Disorder Screening, Public Health Nutrition, and more are competency-based and include knowledge transfer, a web-based global peer community of practice, and local, skills-based mentorships. Trainings use existing, expert-created resources from governments, universities, and medical specialty societies thus ensuring their quality and simultaneously making them free of costs, advertisement, and geographic barriers. To offer free credits for these courses, NextGenU.org partners with universities and professional societies. NextGenU.org ’s comprehensive Lifestyle Medicine Curriculum will launch in early 2017.