What is lifestyle medicine?
What is
lifestyle medicine?
Lifestyle Medicine
(Lifestyle Medicine) is the therapeutic use of evidence-based nutritional
and lifestyle interventions, such as switching to a predominantly unprocessed
and plant-based diet, regular exercise, improving sleep
and reducing stress. These treatments aim to
preventing, treating or in many cases completely reversing
lifestyle-related diseases.It equips individuals with the appropriate knowledge and
life skills for effective behavior change in order to address the underlying
causes of health problems.
Sustainable
health and health care
The enormous increase
of chronic diseases and the associated health costs, in the Netherlands and in
many other countries around the world, is unsustainable. For example, type 2 diabetes is
is a looming global pandemic with incalculable consequences. The Netherlands
already has over 900,000 people with diabetes, and every year there are about
75,000 new diabetes patients every year (which is comparable to a full
Amsterdam Arena). Lifestyle medicine is therefore essential for sustainable
health and health care.
Over 80%
disorders lifestyle related
The good news
is that 80% or more of all disease burden in our country is tied to the
treatment of conditions that have their origins in poor nutritional and
lifestyle choices. Chronic diseases and conditions such as obesity, diabetes
type 2, high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, stroke, depression, osteoporosis
and various cancers - are the most common, costly and
preventable health conditions.
Why nutrition
is central to lifestyle medicine
More and more
people are overweight, developing diabetes or other chronic diseases.
Nutrition often plays a crucial role in this. Usually the basis of these
underlying these health problems is insulin resistance, which is only made
aggravated by continuing to eat rapidly absorbable carbohydrates and
insulin-producing foods. Similarly, obesity has much more to do with a
poor diet than with lack of exercise. For example, according to researchers
of British cardiologists in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. "It is time
to dispel that myth: there is no exercise to counteract a poor
diet."