At Harvard Medical School, a brilliant lifestyle medicine practitioner is leading the future of medicine. Medicine is not limited to treating diseases with pills and procedures; it’s also about preventing diseases with lifestyle behaviors, understanding how we live, and teaching healthier habits early in life. Dr. Beth Frates is a Harvard Medical School faculty member who has spent years building a new approach to healthcare through lifestyle medicine. Currently, she is an Associate Professor, Part-Time at Harvard Medical School in the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital.
Dr. Frates was inspired by her father’s heart attack and stroke which he suffered when he was only 52 years old. At that time, Dr. Frates was in college. Watching her father’s recovery and the focus on his diet, exercise, and stress reduction gave her firsthand experience with the power of healthy lifestyles. Her father attended a Pritikin Cardiac Rehabilitation Center. Dr. Frates knew early on that healing was about more than prescriptions and procedures. Today, she is one of the most respected voices in lifestyle medicine, an award-winning educator at Harvard Medical School and Harvard Extension School, and immediate past president of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine.
Her ideas are helping faculty rethink how future doctors think about nutrition, lifestyle medicine, and prevention. And, it’s all happening at one of the world’s most prestigious medical institutions.
Leading a Movement in Medical Education
Dr. Frates’s services and influence at Harvard Medical School (HMS) are not limited to the traditional lecture halls. In 2008, she founded the first Lifestyle Medicine Interest Group (LMIG), providing students with a space to explore topics such as nutrition, exercise, stress management, and social connection. This parallel curriculum helps fill the gaps in medical school education. Now, 17 years after the founding of the first LMIG, there are over 100 medical schools out of 200 that have started LMIGs. The growth and expansion of these LMIGs is a credit to the collaboration between Dr. Frates and the American College of Lifestyle Medicine (ACLM). Dr. Frates shared her methodology with ACLM in 2015 in hopes that these LMIGs would spread nationally, and they did. Dr. Frates serves as the faculty advisor for the LMIG at the Harvard Medical School, the Extension School, and Harvard College. LMIGs are not just for medical schools! All three schools have LMIGs now, with Harvard College founding theirs in 2025. Dr. Frates has helped bring lifestyle medicine into several different areas of Harvard University.
Each year, the LMIG at HMS hosts events ranging from 5K fundraisers, kickball games, and cooking demonstrations to walk-and-talk lectures and faculty panels. These experiences show students how lifestyle choices affect every area of health. These are the lessons that are often missing from traditional medical training.
In 2015, with the efforts of several Harvard Medical School faculty, the school officially adopted nutrition and lifestyle medicine as a theme in its curriculum. HMS is one of only a few schools with a nutrition and lifestyle medicine theme. This shift allowed case studies, professional development workshops, and even scholarly projects to reflect the real-world importance of lifestyle interventions.
Courses That Are Changing How Doctors Think
Dr. Frates’ teaching philosophy is built around making lifestyle medicine accessible and practical. At Harvard Medical School, her workshops on wellbeing and lifestyle medicine are often included in the professional development weeks for the medical students. Her popular online course created in collaboration with Harvard Medical School and Emeritus, “Health and Wellness: Designing a Sustainable Eating Pattern,” regularly attracts more than 200 students per session and draws participants from around the world. And her Nutrition and Lifestyle Coaching course, created with HMS and Emeritus, is also popular. When taken together, these two online courses provide foundational knowledge to help people adopt and sustain healthy lifestyles for themselves as well as help guide them to empower others to do the same.
At Harvard Extension School, she has created four courses that have influenced thousands of students:
- Lifestyle Medicine 101: An introduction to the six pillars of lifestyle medicine and their impact on chronic disease prevention.
- Culinary Psychology: Exploring the science behind food choices and how they affect mental and physical health.
- Wellness from the Inside Out: Cell to Community: Examining health at every level, from biological processes to social factors.
- Empowering People to Change: Teaching strategies for motivating sustainable health behavior changes.
Her courses are part of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine’s Academic Partial Pathways Programs. These courses at Harvard Extension School are for master’s and bachelor’s level students. Over the past decade, physicians, nurses, and other healthcare professionals have taken these courses as well.
She has also influenced residency programs at Harvard-affiliated hospitals. Since 2022, Dr. Frates has led the Lifestyle Medicine Residency Curriculum (LMRC) efforts for the residents in occupational medicine. In 2024, she helped bring the LMRC to the residents in the physical medicine and rehabilitation program. Fellow HMS faculty and colleagues have introduced LMRC to the psychiatry residency program at MGH as well.
From Campus to Community: Teaching Beyond the Classroom
Dr. Frates believes lifestyle medicine should reach beyond hospitals and lecture halls. In 2024, she and Harvard Medical School student Vivian Wang co-created LIVELY (Lifestyle Interventions Through Empowerment and Leadership in Youth). The program teaches teens in underserved Boston communities about healthy habits, with support from the Office for Community Centered Medical Education. This LIVELY program is a collaboration with the Boys and Girls Clubs of Boston. It won Best Program of 2024 from the Boys and Girls Clubs of Boston and is now expanding, with a Harvard College graduate, Noah Janfaza, winning a Fellowship to bring LIVELY to Puerto Rico and beyond.
A Voice in the Future of Healthcare
Dr. Frates’ influence is not limited to Harvard’s walls. She has spoken across five continents, shaping conversations about health and prevention on a global scale. Her newest contribution, the “Essentials of Clinical Nutrition in Healthcare,” published by McGraw Hill which she co-edited with fellow HMS faculty members, reflects her belief that nutrition belongs at the center of medical education.
Through her non-profit PAVING the Path to Wellness™, she offers a 12-step wellness program that supports patients and providers. She also runs her own lifestyle medicine consulting practice, helping individuals and groups build healthier lives through evidence-based strategies.
Conclusion
Dr. Beth Frates’ philosophy is that health is about how we live day to day. In light of this, she has accomplished major steps such as creating the first lifestyle medicine student group (LMIG) at Harvard and designing some of the most popular courses at Harvard Extension School. Dr. Frates teaches across the entire spectrum of medical education from pre-meds, medical students, residents, fellows, and practicing physicians. Her work is proof that medical education can evolve, that future doctors can learn how lifestyle behaviors can help with the prevention and treatment of chronic conditions, and they can appreciate nutrition and lifestyle as important tools in patient care.
She aims to train the next generation of physicians to think beyond prescriptions and procedures, to consider food, movement, sleep, connection, stress resilience, and avoidance of risky substances as powerful medicine. As she often reminds her students, changing the future of healthcare starts with how we teach it today.
Dr. Frates has helped bring lifestyle medicine to the classrooms of Harvard University and expanded it to reach beyond their four walls.
Meet Abby, a passionate health product reviewer with years of experience in the field. Abby's love for health and wellness started at a young age, and she has made it her life mission to find the best products to help people achieve optimal health. She has a Bachelor's degree in Nutrition and Dietetics and has worked in various health institutions as a Nutritionist.
Her expertise in the field has made her a trusted voice in the health community. She regularly writes product reviews and provides nutrition tips, and advice that helps her followers make informed decisions about their health. In her free time, Abby enjoys exploring new hiking trails and trying new recipes in her kitchen to support her healthy lifestyle.
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