The American College of Lifestyle Medicine (ACLM) has developed a clinical tool to help health care professionals incorporate a food as medicine approach into their practice by assessing and tracking the proportion of whole, unrefined plant-based foods and water intake in their patients' dietary patterns.

The ACLM Diet Screener, a 27-item diet assessment tool available free on ACLM's website, was designed to guide clinical conversations around diet and support nutrition prescriptions, while also being brief enough for use during routine clinical encounters. A multidisciplinary team of clinicians provided input on development of the tool.

While other dietary assessment tools exist, the ACLM Diet Screener is unique because it aligns specifically with the needs of lifestyle medicine clinicians who tend to prescribe a predominantly plant-based diet, captures a picture of the overall diet, and includes simple measures that are understandable and actionable for the patient, said ACLM Senior Director of Research Micaela Karlsen, PhD, lead author on a paper about the screener's development published April 26 in Frontiers in Nutrition.

"Research demonstrates that various kinds of plant-based diets are associated with lower risk of chronic diseases and can be effective interventions for the treatment of cardiovascular disease and even remission of type 2 diabetes," Dr. Karlsen said. "But there was a clear need by clinicians for a tool to better help them bridge that nutritional research into a clinical setting, as well as support treatment protocols and behavior change in patients. The ACLM Diet Screener was developed with these goals in mind."

Lifestyle medicine physicians and nutrition researchers were among the team that started developing the tool in 2021. The team consulted a wide range of resources, such as the U.S. Dietary Guidelines and My Plate, the DASH Diet and the Healthy Eating Index