"Lifestyle Medicine: The Intersection of Public Health and Healthcare"
Abstract
It is well-documented in research that better quality diets and positive health behaviors lead to reduced risk for chronic disease, and most medical authorities recommend lifestyle changes in their standards of care for chronic disease. Despite this, medical education offers extremely limited coverage of nutrition and lifestyle interventions, translating to minimal use in treatment. Lifestyle medicine (LM) is a medical specialty that uses therapeutic lifestyle interventions as a primary modality to treat chronic conditions including cardiovascular diseases, type 2 diabetes, and obesity. LM treatment focuses on six domains of health behaviors—a whole food, plant-predominant eating pattern, physical activity, restorative sleep, stress management, avoidance of risky substances and positive social connections. This talk explores LM, and LM-based medical education, as a path for implementation and dissemination of nutrition and public health research, as well as opportunities for impact in community partnerships and policy.
Speaker Bio
Micaela Karlsen, PhD, MSPH, serves as Sr. Director of Research at the American College of Lifestyle Medicine. She is also Adjunct Faculty for the University of New England Master’ Programs in Applied Nutrition and Global Public Health. Dr. Karlsen is the author of A Plant-Based Life and a contributor to the New York Times bestseller Forks Over Knives: The Plant-Based Way to Health. Her expertise is in dietary patterns, plant-based nutrition and nutritional adequacy, and lifestyle medicine. She holds a PhD in Nutritional Epidemiology from the Tufts Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy and a Masters degree in Human Nutrition from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.