‘Lifestyle Medicine’ Offers 6 Natural Remedies for People and Planet
- Natasha Spencer-Jolliffe
- Aug 22
- 7 min read
Human Health Tied to Personal Habits, for Better or Worse
In today’s fast-paced world, lifestyle choices play a significant role in determining health outcomes and overall well-being. Pollution, stress, and sedentary lifestyles are among the leading factors affecting a person’s ability to live a long and healthy life.
To counteract health risks associated with these modern stressors, a discipline called lifestyle medicine is gaining ground as an effective way to combat chronic disease and improve overall health for individuals, communities—and the planet.
Solution to Global Crises
Backed by science, lifestyle medicine is a decades-old, comprehensive medical practice that uses therapeutic natural lifestyle interventions to help prevent, treat, and often reverse chronic diseases. Neither just lifestyle nor just medicine, lifestyle medicine is about integrating the best of both approaches with a focus on prevention and behavioral change as part of clinical care.
“What sets LM apart from conventional medicine is its focus on the root causes of disease rather than just managing symptoms,” Dr. Neha Pathak, chief physician editor, associate program director, and adjunct assistant professor of medicine at Yale School of Public Health, told The Earth & I.
Operating beyond siloed approaches to either pharmaceutical-based or “alternative” medical practices, lifestyle medicine combines therapeutic and holistic treatments with those of allopathic (conventional) medicine, considering all areas of a patient’s life and the effects of available treatments.
Lifestyle medicine interventions focus on activities individuals can do to take control of their healthcare, while also providing access to traditional medical care. A typical lifestyle medicine care plan includes the “six pillars”: a whole-food, plant-predominant eating pattern; regular physical activity; restorative sleep; stress management; avoidance of toxic exposures (such as smoking); and strong social connections.
The American College of Lifestyle Medicine (ACLM), founded in 2004, is among the organizations that set out lifestyle medicine’s six pillars. It and others work to integrate lifestyle medicine training into medical education and provide tools for reimbursement, medication de-escalation, and behavioral change counseling.
A 2024 study said lifestyle medicine “began as a medical specialty in 2004” and is now a “rapidly growing discipline.”
Lifestyle medicine’s focus on preventing, managing, and reversing chronic diseases is gaining traction. A 2024 study said lifestyle medicine “began as a medical specialty in 2004” and is now a “rapidly growing discipline,” with more than 9,000 members in 2022 in 30 member groups and communities. Researchers highlight how “the cumulative adherence to the principles of LM can positively impact not only the years of life, but life in the years.”
Roots and Evolution
Lifestyle medicine’s roots can be traced back to the 1980s when Dr. John P. Foreyt, regarded as a leading authority on the intersection of lifestyle and chronic disease prevention, laid the groundwork for what would become lifestyle medicine and its principles.
Acceptance grew in the 1990s after an early landmark study on The Lifestyle Heart Trial was published in The Lancet. The study declared that “comprehensive lifestyle changes may be able to bring about regression of even severe coronary atherosclerosis after only 1 year, without the use of lipid-lowering drugs.”
A 2002 study of 3,234 potentially prediabetic people found that lifestyle interventions of nutrition, exercise, and stress management advice could reverse the condition compared with those taking daily metformin or doing nothing. In follow-up exams around three years later, the incidence of type 2 diabetes per 100 person-years was 11.0 for the placebo group, 7.8 for the drug group, and 4.8 for the lifestyle intervention group. In other words, the lifestyle intervention group had reduced their incidence of type 2 diabetes by more than half (58%), compared with 31% of individuals who took metformin to manage their condition
In sum, “the lifestyle intervention was significantly more effective than metformin,” concluded the researchers from George Washington University and Thomas Jefferson University.
Today, studies continue to provide evidence for prescribing lifestyle medicine’s principles through in-depth explorations of its six pillars.
For example, a 2017 study published in The Lancet found that a plant-based diet was “inversely associated with major cardiovascular disease,” meaning that a higher consumption of plant-based foods was associated with a reduction in major cardiovascular disease. A 2010 study published in PLOS Medicine showed that individuals with strong social connections were 50% more likely to survive over the seven-year period analyzed, compared to those with weaker connections across 148 studies with over 300,000 participants.
Lifestyle medicine not only offers value as a preventative approach but also as a treatment for conditions. Dr. Catherine “Cate” Collings, a cardiologist and former president of ACLM, cites growing consensus and updates to medical guidelines as indicators of how applying lifestyle medicine’s pillars can help manage and even reverse chronic diseases, including heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, and some cancers.
Lifestyle medicine also holds promise as a potential solution for other non-communicable diseases (NCDs), such as cerebrovascular diseases. Because many NCDs share the same modifiable risk factors—including hypertension, alcohol consumption, smoking, poor diet, and low physical activity—lifestyle medicine can successfully target many NCDs.
Achieving Health for People and Planet
Lifestyle medicine is also on the rise as a proactive method to prevent diseases linked to environmental factors, such as toxins and climate change.
“We are in a world where heat waves, food insecurity, and mental health crises are rising—LM offers a grounded science-based framework for healing individuals and the planet at the same time,” Dr. Pathak said.
The same behaviors that improve human health, such as eating more locally grown, plant-rich, whole foods, play a pivotal part in tackling climate change. The same can be said for spending time in nature as a stress management strategy or avoiding toxic exposures. “All of these LM interventions also play a role in lowering greenhouse gas emissions, addressing local air pollution, and potentially protecting biodiversity,” said Dr. Pathak.
In 2024 in the US alone, 60% of people had one chronic health condition, while 42% had two or more.
Research studies show that lifestyle medicine is uniquely positioned to address both the chronic disease crisis and the planetary health crisis within the scope of the health care system. In 2024, in the US alone, 60% of people had one chronic health condition while 42% had two or more.
“These are two of the most significant health threats of our time,” Dr. Pathak added.
Traditional medicine often relies on pharmaceuticals and procedures. “LM, on the other hand, empowers patients to change behaviors that are driving illness—this, in turn, can reduce the need for medication and lower healthcare costs and carbon-intensive care as a potent side effect,” said Dr. Pathak.
Thwarting ‘Threat Multipliers’
According to a 2021 study, humanity is faced with what researchers described as a “confluence of crises.” To put it simply, aging populations are burdened by NCDs while negative environmental factors and climate change act as “threat multipliers” that further exacerbate the NCDs and threaten human health.
Lifestyle medicine can help address these threat multipliers and build individual and community resilience.
One example is shifting large groups of patients to a plant-predominant diet. This intervention not only reduces the risk of heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and cancer but also cuts agricultural emissions, conserves water, and reduces land degradation.
Lifestyle medicine offers other powerful co-benefits. For example, active transport like walking or cycling improves cardiovascular health and reduces fossil fuel use and local air pollution. “A lifestyle prescription for one person can ripple outward to benefit families, communities, and the planet,” said Dr. Pathak.
A 2024 study explored the link between lifestyle factors and air pollution. The researchers found that exposure to ambient air pollution raised mortality from any cause and that individual lifestyles impacted this likelihood.
The Challenge of Climate Change
A 2024 report, The Lancet Countdown on health and climate change, emphasized “the record-breaking human costs of climate change, with the two crises leading to a range of health concerns. Heat-related mortality, sleep loss, and life-threatening extreme weather events threaten the global population.”
Climate change even threatens the pillars on which lifestyle medicine is built.
Climate change even threatens the pillars on which lifestyle medicine is built. In 2022, ACLM researchers said the planetary crisis was restricting people’s ability to access health nutrition, safe outdoor exercise, positive social connections, and restorative sleep while making it harder to manage stress and avoid toxic substances.
Systemic Change Needed
Today, the main challenges to lifestyle medicine are systemic. Globally, most healthcare systems aren’t built to prioritize prevention and lifestyle medicine interventions. Many clinicians feel unequipped or unsupported when it comes to delivering lifestyle medicine interventions.
“LM also faces the valid critique that not all patients have access to the resources needed to follow these prescriptions,” said Dr. Pathak. Food deserts, unsafe neighborhoods, lack of green space, and poverty all create barriers to access and to the implementation of health-promoting behaviors.
“What’s urgently needed now is investment in community infrastructure, access to healthy food, safe outdoor spaces, and policies that support equity and health for all,” said Dr. Pathak. In other words, lifestyle medicine must be paired with real and complete systems change to be effective and equitable.
Focusing on Future Health and Well-being
As climate change accelerates, the health of the planet degrades, and chronic disease burdens rise, lifestyle medicine offers a way to address all these challenges simultaneously within the scope of the health system—with scalable, cost-effective, and empowering interventions.
Researchers are already seeing more medical schools and health systems integrating lifestyle medicine into their training and delivery models. As patients demand more holistic, prevention-focused care, lifestyle medicine is well-positioned to meet that need. “We are thankful to see a changing healthcare landscape where LM will hopefully become increasingly central to how healthcare is delivered, especially in primary care,” Dr. Pathak said.
Beyond the clinic, lifestyle medicine is also gaining traction as a public health strategy. It is particularly needed in under-resourced communities where the co-benefits of improved health, reduced environmental harm, and stronger communities are most urgently needed.
“The future of LM is not just promising, it’s essential,” said Dr. Pathak.
*Natasha Spencer-Jolliffe is a freelance journalist and editor. Over the past 10 years, Natasha has reported for a host of publications, exploring the wider world and industries from environmental, scientific, business, legal, and sociological perspectives. Natasha has also been interviewed as an insight provider for research institutes and conferences.
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