American College of Lifestyle Medicine Applauds U.S. Mayors for Recently Adopted Resolution on Plant-Based Approach to Chronic Disease, Climate, Fiscal Sustainability

ST. LOUIS, July 19, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- The American College of Lifestyle Medicine (ACLM) applauds a resolution recently ratified by the U.S. Conference of Mayors supporting a plant-based approach to combat chronic disease, help mitigate the climate crisis and create a more sustainable fiscal trajectory. The upstream approach is modeled after what the City of New York is doing within its public hospital system, within its public schools and government agencies, and in partnership with key stakeholders including every public and private hospital system, health centers, smaller provider networks, community-based organizations, and student and community councils among others.

The resolution, introduced by New York City Mayor Eric Adams, hopes to address the nation's currently unsustainable trajectory of record rates of lifestyle-related chronic diseases, our environment at risk, and our fiscal outlook burdened by health care spending driven primarily by management of lifestyle-related chronic diseases.

The resolution cites U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) statistics that 60% of U.S. adults have a chronic disease and 40% of adults have two or more chronic diseases such as heart disease, hypertension, or type 2 diabetes; these are leading causes of death and disability in the country and are primary drivers of the nation's $4.1 trillion  annual health care spending.

The resolution also notes that a primary driver of climate change is the food we grow, promote, and consume on a daily basis. Research from the United Nations, The Lancet, and Nature Food demonstrate that plant-based foods are both less resource intensive to produce and emit roughly half of the greenhouse gases emitted by producing most animal-based foods. Aggregate estimates by the United Nations Environment Program state that, if executed over the coming 25 years, a global shift to a plant-based diet could reduce mortality and greenhouse gases caused by food production by 10% and 70%, respectively.

Specifically, the resolution states: "the United States Conference of Mayors supports the upstream approach to combat chronic disease, the climate crisis, and support a more sustainable fiscal trajectory similar to the City of New York utilizing a plant-based approach including:

• exploring opportunities to advance lifestyle medicine in hospital and health care systems;
• exploring opportunities to include more plant-based options in any setting where city government provides food to constituents (schools, hospitals, social services);
• exploring opportunities to promote the benefits of a plant-based approach to constituents through public awareness campaigns;
• exploring opportunities to evaluate the environmental impact of food choices;
• moving toward a more plant-centered approach for individual and population health, as well as local and global environmental well-being; and
• exploring opportunities to use these new interventions to tackle budget issues facing every city in the short and long term."

Interventions suggested by the resolution include a focus on a plant-predominant eating pattern centered on the consumption of whole, minimally processed fruits, vegetables, legumes, whole-grains, nuts, and seeds that has been shown to prevent, treat, and bring into remission chronic diseases such as type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and hypertension. Such an eating pattern also relieves environmental stress "one meal at a time, as plant-based eating patterns place significantly less resource demands on the environment compared to meals found in the standard American diet." And "by working to create healthier populations, we thereby lessen health care costs and their associated outsized presence on our future balance sheets."

The resolution goes on to state:

The City of New York under the leadership of Mayor Eric Adams has received national recognition over the past year for "the expansion of lifestyle medicine programs within its public health care system, and for its citywide initiative with every public and private hospital and health system to train every health care practitioner in the principles of lifestyle medicine with a particular focus on nutrition education."

New York City has also received recognition for its advancement of plant-based menu options at its public schools, within its public hospital system, and throughout every setting where the government serves food to people, connecting food with the health of body, planet, and budget. 

"In the years since New York City began a dedicated Plant-Based Lifestyle Medicine Program at NYC Health + Hospitals/Bellevue, patients have experienced significant improvement in their cardiometabolic health, including weight loss, improved blood sugar, and reduction of other risk factors," the resolution said. NYC Health + Hospitals Plant-Based Lifestyle Medicine programs are now expanding beyond Bellevue to at least one site in every borough of New York City, in what the resolution calls the single-largest expansion of clinical lifestyle medicine programs anywhere in the United States. 

"The switch to primarily plant-based menu options also stands to save the hospital system approximately $500,000 annually compared with the standard meals being served previously and to help reduce the city's food-based carbon emissions."

Furthermore, it says "Over the last few years, NYC public schools have served millions of plant-based meals, have deployed educational campaigns showing young people the food-environmental health connection, and have reduced carbon emissions compared with the meals they would have served previously."

In late 2022, the City of New York partnered with the American College of Lifestyle Medicine (ACLM) to offer free training to 200,000 health care practitioners in the principles of lifestyle medicine with a focus on plant-based nutrition education—what the resolution called "the largest training offering to educate doctors, nurses, nurse practitioners, certified health coaches, and other health care professionals anywhere in the world."

"We applaud the nation's visionary mayors, who are in unique positions to effect change through work with municipal agencies and affiliated institutions and public-private partnerships," said ACLM President Beth Frates, MD, FACLM, DipABLM. "The City of New York has been an exemplary model on which other cities can build, and we urge that this resolution be broadly embraced to improve our nation's health."

The United States Conference of Mayors is the official non-partisan organization of cities with populations of 30,000 or more. There are over 1,400 such cities in the country today. Each city is represented in the Conference by its chief elected official, the mayor.

ABOUT ACLM: The American College of Lifestyle Medicine is the nation's medical professional society advancing lifestyle medicine as the foundation for a redesigned, value-based and equitable healthcare delivery system, leading to whole-person health. ACLM educates, equips, empowers and supports its members through quality, evidence-based education, certification and research to identify and eradicate the root cause of chronic disease, with a clinical outcome goal of health restoration as opposed to disease management.

SOURCE American College of Lifestyle Medicine