Lifestyle medicine is backed by science

It’s time to bust a myth about lifestyle medicine. Many people think that because the interventions that I prescribe often are lifestyle modifications, dealing with nutrition or exercise or sleep improvements, that what I am practicing is not real medicine.   Lifestyle medicine goes to the root cause of the disease or the medical condition, and lifestyle medicine is 100% science backed.

The recommendations that I give to my patients are based on rigorous clinical evidence and scientific research in very high level institutions across the world, the same as if I were to prescribe a medication for a patient. I know that that medication has been tested in hundreds of thousands of people for safety and efficacy.

The same is true if I say to a patient, you are overweight and you’ve got insulin resistance. You need to go to the gym and work on your strength and your muscle bulk because I have seen many clinical trials that confirm that strength training has fantastic power to improve weight loss and to reverse insulin resistance.

So that recommendation is based on science, even though it’s not a medication prescription, but a behaviour.  Although we often prescribe behavioural changes…those recommendations are based on real science and they have real power and they result in real favourable outcomes and generally they have no negative side effects, and this is the beauty of lifestyle medicine.  We treat the cause of the problem without giving you more problems to deal with in the future.