American Medical Association awards ACLM CEO Susan Benigas its 2025 Medical Executive Meritorious Achievement Award

The award honors medical society executives who have made outstanding contributions to the profession of medicine by improving medical practice, education, or public health.

ST. LOUIS, Nov. 20, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- The American Medical Association (AMA) has awarded Susan Benigas, chief executive officer of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine (ACLM), its 2025 Medical Executive Meritorious Achievement Award for her exceptional leadership and service in advancing lifestyle medicine to improve patient outcomes. The award honors medical society executives who have made outstanding contributions to the profession of medicine by improving medical practice, education, or public health.

Since joining ACLM in 2014, Benigas has led the organization through a period of extraordinary growth in size, scope, reach and impact. During her tenure, ACLM has grown from 380 members and one part-time staff member to a thriving 15,000-member medical professional society today with a team of 45 staff members operating across 23 states. Under her direction, the College has become a driving force in medical education reform, embedding lifestyle medicine—including food as medicine—into undergraduate, graduate, and continuing medical education. It also supports its members with comprehensive practice guidance, including expert consensus statements, clinical practice guidelines, clinical practice tools, and patient-facing educational resources, coupled with groundbreaking research, key partnerships, and advocacy to remove practice barriers.

In 2016, Benigas co-founded the Lifestyle Medicine Global Alliance (LMGA) under ACLM's umbrella, expanding the reach of lifestyle medicine worldwide. What began as a collaboration among five national societies has grown into a coalition of 32 lifestyle medicine medical societies across the world.

"Susan Benigas exemplifies visionary leadership, tirelessly advancing evidence-based approaches that have made a profound impact on the medical profession and the patients we serve," said AMA Board Chair David H. Aizuss, MD. "Her commitment to innovation, collaboration, and education has helped bring lifestyle medicine into mainstream health care, empowering physicians to address the causes of chronic disease. Her work exemplifies outstanding medical executive leadership."

Lifestyle medicine is an evidence-based medical specialty that applies therapeutic lifestyle interventions to treat, reverse, and prevent chronic conditions like cardiovascular diseases, type 2 diabetes, and obesity. By empowering patients to make lifestyle behavior changes in six interconnected pillars—whole food, plant-predominant nutrition, physical activity, restorative sleep, stress management, connectedness, and risky substance avoidance—lifestyle medicine aims to eradicate the root cause of a disease.

Today, an estimated 60% of Americans, including far too many children, live with at least one chronic disease, contributing to the nearly $4.5 trillion in annual healthcare costs borne by taxpayers, even though the vast majority of these conditions are treatable. Studies have shown that lifestyle medicine can impact up to 80% of chronic diseases.

The treatment, reversal and prevention of chronic disease at its root cause remains the organization's focus under Benigas' leadership, with a vision in which lifestyle medicine is the foundation of health and all health care and the standard of care goal is health restoration rather than mere management of disease.

"I'm grateful to the AMA Board of Trustees for this special recognition. I see this, though, as a team, rather than individual, acknowledgment. Without our incredible team, ACLM would not be where it is today: the nation's fastest-growing medical professional association. ACLM is a transformation catalyst and magnet for purpose-, passion-driven people, which is true for our board, our members, and our staff—all united as a galvanized force for change. We're united in addressing our nation's most pressing health issues, with lifestyle medicine delivering the hope, healing and health our world so desperately needs." 

The award was presented by AMA President and ACLM member Bobby Mukkamala, MD, DipABLM, at ACLM's recent annual conference, Lifestyle Medicine 2025, at the Gaylord Texan in Grapevine, Texas, on Nov. 19. The event was a sellout for in-person attendance of 2,200 and virtual attendance of just under 3,000.

About ACLM®: The American College of Lifestyle Medicine (ACLM) is the nation's medical professional society advancing the field of lifestyle medicine as the foundation of a redesigned, value-based and equitable health care delivery system, essential to achieving the Quintuple Aim and whole-person health. ACLM represents, advocates for, trains, certifies and equips its members to identify and eradicate the root cause of chronic disease by optimizing modifiable risk factors. ACLM is filling the gaping void of lifestyle medicine in medical education, providing more than 1.2 million hours of lifestyle medicine education to physicians and other health professionals since 2004, while also advancing research, clinical practice and reimbursement strategies.

SOURCE American College of Lifestyle Medicine