American Journal of Health Promotion honors P-POD's 9/30-10/2 keynote speaker for plant-based nutrition and Lifestyle Medicine innovation. P-POD's long-awaited appearance of remarkable visionary healthcare innovator Michelle McMacken, MD FACP DipABLM takes place in Newark this autumn (with a virtual option). One month ago, the American Journal of Health Promotion HERE added a place in “The 13 Most Influential Women Leaders in Health Promotion” to her well-deserved honors, and a tribute to her there was written by two-time past P-POD speaker Dexter Shurney, MD MBA MPH FACLM DipABLM, Past President of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine. She is renowned nationally and even internationally mainly for having founded in 2018 and then directed the ground-breaking Bellevue Plant-Based Lifestyle Medicine Program, first of its kind in a safety-net healthcare institution, and now being replicated to six other city locations under her leadership at NYC Health + Hospitals, the largest public health care system in the U.S. She developed a successful team-based care model emphasizing lifestyle behavior change to reduce cardiometabolic risk in vulnerable populations, and this is spurring ideas for similar medical initiatives elsewhere.
In her current role as Executive Director of Nutrition and Lifestyle Medicine for NYC Health + Hospitals, Dr. McMacken leads the most comprehensive expansion of lifestyle medicine programming in the U.S., providing free fundamentals coursework to all the healthcare practitioners deployed by the city government. An Associate Professor at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, she served for eighteen years as an internist for the Bellevue Program for Survivors of Torture and as the Director of the Adult Weight Management Program in the Department of Medicine. She says that like most physicians, she had little to no nutrition instruction during her training, and early on she felt ill equipped to counsel patients about food choices, saw her patients not getting much better, and felt close to the all-too-common physician burnout. Then, self-education led to an embrace of veganism and whole food plant-based eating choices, reigniting her passion for medicine as she championed using evidence-based plant-based nutrition successfully to combat patients' chronic diseases. See our complete detailed P-POD biography of Dr. McMacken HERE!
