Health Equity in Lifestyle Medicine: Essential Lessons for Every LM Practitioner

Presentation Summary: The field of lifestyle medicine is experiencing rapid growth globally, and practitioners work in increasingly diverse communities with unique historical, cultural, linguistic, and political contexts. In order to optimize the health restoration potential of lifestyle medicine, especially among populations experiencing disproportionate burdens of lifestyle-related chronic disease, practitioners require a framework and skillset informed by health equity principles. Lifestyle medicine and health equity have natural synergy around the fundamental goal of empowering individuals and communities to attain the highest level of health regardless of race, ethnicity, class, socioeconomic status, gender, sexual orientation, or geography. Nevertheless, rampant health disparities in health outcomes ranging from infant mortality to cardiovascular disease indicate that much work remains in achieving this goal.

The American College of Lifestyle Medicine’s Health Equity Achieved Through Lifestyle Medicine (HEAL) Initiative is its own response to the need for enhanced training, exposure and support among lifestyle medicine practitioners. Despite these efforts to equip healthcare professionals with practical health equity skills, significant knowledge gaps remain among the multidisciplinary corps of lifestyle medicine practitioners. There is urgency in this work given the known human and financial cost of not addressing health disparities, as evidenced by recently published research estimating 80 million years of potential life lost among the U.S. Black population during a roughly 20-year study period (Caraballo et al. 2023).

This presentation is based on an upcoming textbook to be released in Fall 2025, “Health Equity-Driven Lifestyle Medicine”, in the Lifestyle Medicine series by Dr. James Rippe, and is co-edited by Drs. Qadira Ali, Faith Nyong and David Bowman. This book - and this presentation - emerges to fill the knowledge and practical application gaps by comprehensively detailing the “who, what, where, why, and how” of integrating health equity into the foundation of lifestyle medicine practice. We will address critical historical and political context of current health disparities and explore key concepts relevant to working effectively with diverse communities. Given the extant research on the powerful role of social determinants of health, including social, economic and structural factors, on health outcomes, we will discuss in depth how several key social determinants interplay with the six pillars of lifestyle medicine. We will then explore specific chronic diseases, including diabetes and cardiovascular disease, that impact historically marginalized communities disproportionately with a reflection on the role of lifestyle medicine interventions applied in a culturally competent manner. In addition, we will highlight health equity implications of providing care to patients belonging to subpopulations with high burdens of health disparities. We conclude with a focus on health equity-driven lifestyle medicine in practice, including an exploration on themes ranging from effective community partnership development to research and evaluation considerations.