Physicians improved patient outcomes and joy of practice through nutrition education.

ROCHESTER, NEW YORK, USA, March 4, 2022 /EINPresswire.com/ -- More than 90% of adults aged 65 and over have at least 1 chronic disease. The prevalence of multimorbidity, or multiple chronic diseases, is also on the rise. It is believed that 80% of chronic illness could be eliminated through optimizing lifestyle, and the leading lifestyle cause of chronic illness is poor nutrition.

There is a growing body of evidence that a whole-food plant-based (WFPB) diet can halt the progression of, and even reverse, many of our most common chronic diseases. To that end, Rochester Lifestyle Medicine Institute (RLMI), a medical education non-profit in upstate New York, has developed a 2-part program, as documented in a newly published paper.

The program first educated clinicians about a WFPB diet, and then invited them to send their patients through RLMI's 15-Day Jumpstart program. This program provided nutrition education and the skills for moving to a WFPB diet. This is the first effort to combine the education of practitioners with a clinical program for their patients as an approach to changing the culture and practice patterns of a community.

Data for both the nutrition course and the 15-Day Jump­start program were collected and analyzed as part of a quality improvement program. The results were dramatic. 96% of clinicians made changes to their own diet by the end of the course. Three months later, 100% of respondents (clinicians) reported that they were more likely to discuss nutrition with their patients, and 73% said that they had patients who had experienced significant changes in their health as a result of being counseled about and trained in WFPB nutrition. Patients experienced improvements in weight, blood pressure, cholesterol, and fasting blood sugar.

This 2-part approach – teaching clinicians about WFPB nutrition, and then enabling them to see rapid improvements in their patients’ health – may provide a template for culture change, by creating a feedback loop with multiple benefits. These benefits include improved patient health and clinicians reporting more rewarding work with patients.

RLMI's efforts were summarized in a paper that was published in the Jan/Feb 2022 Journal of Family Practice. Learn more by reading the paper (starting on page 112) here - https://rochesterlifestylemedicine.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/ACLM_2022_FP_Supplement.pdf

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Rochester Lifestyle Medicine Institute's mission is to establish Lifestyle Medicine, especially the adoption of Whole-Food Plant-Based nutrition, as the foundation for health and the healthcare system. The team at Rochester Lifestyle Medicine Institute (RLMI) envisions a world where Lifestyle Medicine is the standard of care within the healthcare system, and where people are empowered to make lifestyle behavior changes based on the tenets of Lifestyle Medicine.

Robert Franki
Rochester Lifestyle Medicine Institute
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