What is Lifestyle Medicine

What & Why?

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Evidence-based lifestyle medicine studies the lifestyle changes which have been shown to cause lifestyle-related chronic diseases and what lifestyle changes in what prescription dose are needed to prevent, treat and even reverse these diseases.  The reason the same lifestyle changes are beneficial in reversing so many chronic diseases is that they each affect and share so many common underlying biological causes, mechanisms and pathways including your genetic expression.

Your genetics are not your destiny. Research has shown that lifestyle changes turn your genes on (upregulate them) to facilitate healing or they can turn them off (downregulate them) that cause chronic inflammation, oxidative stress and other mechanisms causing disease. (Dean Ornish, MD)

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The list of pathways that our lifestyle effects are

1. Chronic Emotional Stress and Depression Overstimulate the Sympathetic Nervous System.               4. Our Microbiome     

2. Gene Expression                                                                                                                                           5. Angiogenesis

3. Telomeres                                                                                                                                                      6. Blood Flow & Stasis 

Which Chronic Diseases does LM Prevent Treat & Reverse?

The important implications of this new unifying theory are to stop seeing chronic diseases as being fundamentally different from each other and to begin viewing them as diverse manifestations and expressions of similar underlying mechanisms, all of which are powerfully affected by the lifestyle choices we make every day - for better and for worse.

(Dean Ornish, MD)