The first of the two resources, the Lifestyle Medicine Medical School Curriculum, is a turnkey program intended to weave evidence-based nutrition and broader lifestyle medicine content through all four years of undergraduate medical training. It arrives as medical schools face encouragement to provide at least 40 hours of nutrition instruction, with the federal expectation beginning in Fall 2026. Rather than leaving schools to build their own courses from scratch, the curriculum functions as a ready-made scaffold that institutions can adapt. It includes 10 learning modules covering all aspects of lifestyle medicine education, including the required nutrition content, delivered through virtual learning units, clinical application opportunities, and assessment tools designed to support competency development.

Importantly, the curriculum does not treat nutrition as an isolated topic. It situates dietary science within the six pillars of lifestyle medicine: nutrition, physical activity, restorative sleep, stress management, social connectedness, and avoidance of risky substances. Students encounter clinical cases, nutrition assessment exercises, behavior change strategies, and patient communication approaches that emphasize real-world application. The goal, according to the college, is to help future physicians understand the interconnected role of these factors in treating, reversing, and preventing chronic disease, and to translate that understanding into clinical practice rather than memorizing isolated nutrition facts for examinations.

Brenda Rea, ACLM’s medical director of education, a physician and registered dietitian nutritionist who also holds credentials as a lifestyle medicine intensivist, framed the need for a longitudinal approach. Medical students, she said, need much more than isolated nutrition lectures; they need an educational experience spread across their training that helps them understand how nutrition and other lifestyle factors influence chronic disease and how to apply that knowledge with patients. She described the college’s goal as making high-quality nutrition and lifestyle medicine education easier for medical schools to implement and more meaningful for the physicians those schools produce.

To lower the barrier to adoption further, the medical school curriculum comes with complimentary access to the ACLM Culinary Medicine Curriculum and the Culinary Medicine Program. These open-source resources provide nearly 15 hours of self-paced video instruction along with a comprehensive teaching toolkit. The culinary medicine materials are designed to prepare clinicians, clinicians in training, and members of the public to incorporate optimal nutrition into daily eating patterns, adding a practical, kitchen-adjacent dimension to what can otherwise remain an abstract classroom subject. The combination of didactic modules, clinical application, and culinary training reflects a growing recognition that teaching patients to change what they eat requires skills that go beyond reciting dietary guidelines.

The second resource targets clinicians who are already in practice. ACLM has launched the third edition of its online course, Food as Medicine: Nutrition for Treatment and Risk Reduction, a 2.75-hour program intended to help health professionals translate nutrition science into concrete strategies for treating and reducing the risk of common chronic diseases. The course examines evidence-based dietary patterns, food groups, and nutrition strategies related to cardiovascular disease, insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes, obesity, and certain cancers. It also explores the roles of carbohydrate, fat, and protein sources in health outcomes and provides practical approaches to patient-centered nutrition counseling and behavior change.

The learning objectives are explicitly practical. Upon completing the course, participants should be able to describe dietary patterns shown to be effective in treating and reducing the risk of common lifestyle-related chronic diseases, discuss how dietary behaviors affect the development and progression of chronic disease, identify how different macronutrient sources may contribute to disease progression or improvement, and apply foundational strategies to support dietary behavior change. Those objectives mirror the technical core of lifestyle medicine itself: identifying which dietary patterns carry the strongest evidence, understanding the physiological mechanisms linking diet to cardiometabolic disease, and mastering the behavioral techniques that make counseling effective in the exam room.

Michelle McMacken, executive director of nutrition and lifestyle medicine at NYC Health + Hospitals, a board-certified lifestyle medicine physician, emphasized the clinical context in which such training matters. Patients, she noted, hear a constant stream of confusing and often contradictory nutrition messages, which presents health professionals with an important opportunity to provide clear, evidence-based guidance. She described the course as giving members of the interprofessional care team a working command of the evidence and practical strategies for delivering meaningful dietary counseling within the realities of clinical care, where time is short and patients arrive with entrenched habits and conflicting information from social media and marketing.

The intended audience for the course is deliberately broad. Although it may support physicians seeking education relevant to state-level nutrition education requirements, ACLM stresses that requirements vary by state and medical board, and physicians should confirm eligibility with their licensing authority before counting the course toward any mandate. The course is also designed for registered nurses, nurse practitioners, physician associates, registered dietitians, pharmacists, physical and occupational therapists, certified health coaches, and other health professionals working in chronic disease treatment and prevention, as well as clinicians still in training. That breadth reflects the reality that nutrition counseling increasingly happens across an interprofessional team rather than solely through the physician. Participants can earn 2.75 continuing education credits, and the course will remain available through September 14, 2029, giving clinicians a multi-year window to complete it.

The launch arrives at a moment when the American College of Lifestyle Medicine has been steadily building infrastructure to scale lifestyle medicine as a standard of care. Since 2004, the organization has trained more than 100,000 health professionals and made more than 1.75 million hours of accredited continuing education available through courses and conferences for physicians and health professionals. With hundreds of institutional partners worldwide, ACLM describes its mission as helping healthcare move from a system designed to manage disease to one capable of restoring health. The new medical school curriculum and the updated food as medicine course represent that strategy applied at two critical points in the professional pipeline: the training of future physicians who will soon be required to learn nutrition at a defined minimum level, and the continuing education of the existing clinical workforce that must counsel patients today. If medical schools adopt the turnkey model at scale, the initiative could accelerate the integration of evidence-based nutrition and whole-person care into mainstream medical training, bringing the treatment of root causes of chronic disease closer to the center of American clinical practice.

Subject of Research: Lifestyle medicine and nutrition education resources for medical schools and practicing clinicians

Article Title: ACLM launches two solutions to advance nutrition and lifestyle medicine education, helping meet federal and state requirements

Article References: ACLM launches two solutions to advance nutrition and lifestyle medicine education, helping meet federal and state requirements. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: American College of Lifestyle Medicine, medical education, nutrition education, lifestyle medicine, food as medicine, continuing education, chronic disease, culinary medicine, medical school curriculum, dietary counseling, health professionals, federal requirements

The research focused on one of the most medically vulnerable populations in oncology: patients with blood cancers undergoing allogeneic hematopoietic cell transplantation. In this intensive procedure, patients receive high-dose chemotherapy, sometimes combined with radiation, to destroy their immune systems before donor stem cells are introduced to rebuild them. These individuals spend weeks in the hospital and are routinely given antibiotics to prevent and treat infections during the period when their defenses are essentially wiped out. Eighty percent of the patients in the study received at least one broad-spectrum antibiotic, the class of drugs that exerts the strongest impact on the microbiome because it targets many types of bacteria at once, obliterating beneficial organisms along with dangerous ones.

Antibiotics are, of course, lifesaving tools, but their broad activity comes at a cost. By indiscriminately killing bacteria, they can hollow out the gut’s ecological diversity, creating space for opportunistic pathogens to flourish. Microbiome diversity is widely regarded as a key indicator of gut health, and its loss has previously been linked with poorer clinical outcomes in patients with cancer. Preserving that diversity, the new study suggests, may be within patients’ control through something as ordinary as their meal choices.

What sets this investigation apart from most nutrition research is the extraordinary granularity of its dietary data. Over five years, the research team tracked 9,419 meals eaten by 173 hospitalized patients. Every time a patient ordered a meal from the hospital kitchen, the tray arrived with a questionnaire asking them to record how much of each item they ate and drank. By combining these real-time records with the kitchen’s nutritional information, the scientists catalogued more than 40,000 individual food items. For each patient, the team followed between eight and 128 meals across a window stretching from 12 days before transplantation to 49 days after. In parallel, they profiled microbiome diversity in more than 1,000 stool samples from 158 patients.

Marcel van den Brink, M.D., Ph.D., co-senior author of the study and president of City of Hope Los Angeles and City of Hope chief physician executive, emphasized how unusual this dataset is. Unlike past nutrition studies that depend on patients’ recollections of what they ate or on other imprecise surveys, his team worked with meticulous dietary records collected in real time, a level of detail that allowed them to detect patterns that would otherwise be impossible to see. Van den Brink, a globally recognized leader in microbiome research, cell transplantation and cancer immunotherapy, collaborated with Jonathan Peled, M.D., Ph.D., of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Jonas Schluter, Ph.D., of NYU’s Grossman School of Medicine.

Armed with this data, the researchers deployed a battery of advanced statistical models to search for dietary patterns associated with injury to the gut microbiome. The signal that emerged was strikingly consistent. No matter how the team analyzed the data, the same result kept appearing: patients who consumed more sweets while taking antibiotics were more likely to experience a loss of microbiome diversity as aggressive microbes crowded out other strains of bacteria. One organism in particular stood out, Enterococcus, a bacterium whose domination of the gut is associated with a higher risk of bloodstream infections, graft-versus-host disease and other life-threatening complications in transplant patients.

The magnitude of the effect was substantial. The combination of high-sugar foods and broad-spectrum antibiotics appeared to multiply the damage to the microbiome, producing a 24 percent drop in bacterial diversity for every 100-gram increase in sweets consumed, an amount of sugar roughly equivalent to a large milkshake. In other words, the dietary factor did not merely add to antibiotic-induced injury; it appeared to interact with it, deepening the ecological collapse that broad-spectrum drugs alone can trigger.

To test whether the association reflected a genuine biological mechanism rather than a statistical coincidence, the researchers turned to animal models. They gave broad-spectrum antibiotics to healthy mice and fed the animals a variety of diets. Mice eating a high-sucrose diet rapidly developed an overgrowth of Enterococcus in their guts, mirroring the pattern seen in the hospitalized patients. Critically, mice that ate the high-sugar diet without receiving antibiotics maintained normal bacterial diversity, indicating that sugar alone was not the culprit; rather, it was the combination of sugar and antibiotics that proved destructive. Van den Brink noted that the convergence of animal studies with the patient data provides a compelling rationale for future clinical trials to evaluate whether reducing sugar intake during antibiotic use would protect the microbiome.

The implications extend well beyond the transplant ward. The microbiome is increasingly recognized as an important factor in cancer care, influencing how patients respond to therapy and how they recover from it, and the better clinicians understand what supports or disrupts it, the more opportunities they have to reduce treatment side effects. For hospitalized cancer patients, diet represents one of the most practical levers hospitals can pull to support recovery. Van den Brink pointed out an uncomfortable irony in current clinical practice: many of the foods and drinks that hospitals encourage patients to consume, including nutritional shakes, smoothies and sports drinks, are high in sugar, something he said will need to be re-evaluated when prescribing antibiotics.

The study also reframes the concept of antibiotic stewardship. Traditionally, stewardship has focused on limiting antibiotic use to prevent the emergence of resistance, but the new findings suggest it should also encompass how different antibiotics affect the microbiome, since some disrupt beneficial gut bacteria far more than others. Van den Brink encourages patients to ask their healthcare teams to ensure that antibiotics are thoughtfully chosen from equally effective treatment options for controlling infections. As for whether people on antibiotics should simply cut out sugar, he counsels a measured approach. It is premature, he said, to recommend that everyone taking antibiotics avoid sugar, but he also observed that there is no strong evidence that probiotics help preserve or restore microbiome diversity, even though many people take them anyway. Limiting sugar, by contrast, carries no known harm and is an easy thing to try. The work was supported by the National Cancer Institute, the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, and the Susan and Peter Solomon Microbiome, Nutrition and Cancer Program at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and it reinforces a growing movement in medicine to treat food not merely as fuel but as an active component of therapeutic care.

Subject of Research: The interaction between dietary sugar and antibiotics in disrupting gut microbiome diversity in cancer patients undergoing stem cell transplantation

Article Title: Study suggests skipping sweets during antibiotic treatment may help protect the gut microbiome

Article References: Study suggests skipping sweets during antibiotic treatment may help protect the gut microbiome. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: gut microbiome, antibiotics, sugar, stem cell transplant, microbiome diversity, Enterococcus, cancer care, nutrition, food as medicine, City of Hope, Nature, antibiotic stewardship