November 03, 2025
2 min read
Key takeaways:
- Healthy lifestyle behaviors have a primary role in the prevention of cardiometabolic diseases.
- Despite this, very few adults maintain healthy measures of physical activity, diet, smoking and BMI.
BOSTON — Healthy lifestyle behaviors greatly influence risk for cardiometabolic diseases; however, the practice of behavior change can be challenging and complex for patients, according to a speaker at the Cardiometabolic Health Congress.
Lenny Kaminsky, PhD, FAHA, said behavior change is “anything but simple.” Health care professionals play an important role in advocating for healthy lifestyle behavior change.
Healthy lifestyle behaviors have a primary role in the prevention of cardiometabolic diseases. Image: Adobe Stock
“Often when we’re considering prevention of cardiovascular disease, we start with looking at risk factors. Certainly, there are the common nonmodifiable risk factors such as age, sex and family history,” Kaminsky, who is professor emeritus at the Fisher Institute of Health and Well-Being and founder of the Ball State University Healthy Lifestyle Center in Muncie, Indiana, said during the presentation. But then there are modifiable factors, or lifestyle behaviors, that can affect both primary and secondary prevention of CVD, Kaminsky said.
Kaminsky said most guidelines emphasize healthy lifestyle behaviors.
In 2022, the American Heart Association updated its Life’s Simple 7 — a set of lifestyle factors that promote optimal CV health — to include a sleep metric, renaming it Life’s Essential 8. The eight metrics now include diet, physical activity, nicotine exposure, sleep, body weight, lipids, blood glucose and BP.
However, the practice of healthy lifestyle behaviors to prevent CVD in the U.S. population is poor, Kaminsky said.
Kaminsky cited a previous report published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings that estimated only 2.7% of U.S. adults achieved all four healthy lifestyle characteristics: sufficient physical activity, healthy diet, not smoking and recommended body fat percentage.
Kaminsky highlighted a 2018 study published in Circulation that showed estimated significant life expectancy gains among men and women who maintained healthy lifestyle behaviors.
“[The report] wasn’t specific to cardiovascular disease, but they looked at life expectancy compared with individuals’ healthy lifestyle behaviors,” including smoking, BMI, physical activity, alcohol intake and diet quality, Kaminsky said. “As they increased in the number of lifestyle behaviors, we saw an increasing number of years of gained life expectancy, and this went across the age spectrum, from 50 up to 105 years of age.”
In clinical practice, advocating for healthy lifestyle behaviors can be challenging for many reasons:
- Discussion of lifestyle is typically a limited or secondary communication.
- Health care professionals have limited time for patient appointments.
- Poor compliance of patients to adopt healthy lifestyle behavior recommendations.
- Making prescriptions for lifestyle change is not “one-size-fits-all.”
Other limitations include a lack of training in lifestyle medicine and poor referral rates to allied health professionals, such as registered dietitians.
Kaminsky said there is “an intention-behavior gap in what people intend to do, from a healthy lifestyle perspective, and their follow-through.”
When discussing health behavior change with patients, “start with the ‘be’ factor,” he said, and emphasize the importance of being healthy. “Describe that to patients and encourage them. Secondly, move to the ‘do’ step: the plan of prescription. Don’t just give them a standardized set of recommendations. Work out that plan, and then follow through and support the action step.”
Kaminsky said use the SMART goal-setting model to help patients with their health behaviors; this involves setting goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound.
“Making a behavior change, we understand, is challenging and complex, but we need to do a better job of being advocates for this to help our patients,” Kaminsky said.
Sources/Disclosures
Source:
Kaminsky L. The importance of healthy lifestyle behaviors in the prevention of cardiovascular disease. Presented at: Cardiometabolic Health Congress; Oct. 23-25, 2025; Boston.
References:
Disclosures:
Kaminsky reports no relevant financial disclosures.