Personalized Lifestyle Medicine: Relevance for Nutrition and Lifestyle Recommendations

Table 1

Differentiation among medical systems.

Preventative medicine	Lifestyle medicine	Personalized medicine	Functional medicine	Personalized lifestyle medicine
(i) Public health recommendations from opinion leader organizations; (ii) Generalized guidelines; (iii) Focused on prevention rather than treatment	(i) Could be preventive or therapeutic guidelines; (ii) Encompasses a broad set of therapies related to one’s living and behavioral patterns; (iii) Practiced by wide range of medical professionals	(i) Focused on therapeutic strategies involving individualized pharmaceutical prescriptions for improved safety and efficacy; (ii) Genomics as foundational tool; (iii) Investigational and research driven; (iv) Practiced by physicians; (v) Patient-centered treatment	(i) Operational system developed to assess a patient’s etiology and to devise a treatment protocol to address underlying causes; (ii) Composed of multiple heuristics to lead the process of the therapeutic encounter; (iii) Involves training and certification; (iv) Focus on disease origin	(i) Next generation of medicine; (ii) Tailored lifestyle medicine prescriptions directed to the individual based on diagnostics, including genomics and epigenetic information; (iii) Uses functional medicine as the underlying operating system but requires the integration of other medical systems; (iv) Patient-centered outcomes