Artificial Intelligence in Lifestyle Medicine: Advancing Clinical Practice, Education, and Whole-Person Care With Responsible Innovation

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming health care, offering new opportunities to enhance education, clinical care, and system-level integration. Lifestyle medicine (LM), with its emphasis on behavior change and whole-person care is particularly well positioned to benefit from these advances. This perspective provides an overview of emerging and potential applications of AI across the field, including clinician training and self-directed learning, AI-augmented clinical supervision, patient-facing tools for health behavior change, mental health and emotional well-being, real-time access to scientific evidence, clinical reasoning support, and system-level planning to connect with community resources that address social determinants of health. While these tools offer significant promise to improve scalability, consistency, and personalization of care, they also introduce risks related to data privacy, bias, and overreliance on automated recommendations. Acknowledging recent controversies about AI risks and the rapid evolution of this technology, we propose practical guardrails for clinicians and highlight the importance of leadership engagement to ensure that AI development and its use in the field aligns with the principles of LM and whole-person care. Thoughtful integration of AI with human agency that propels critical thinking has the potential to strengthen, rather than diminish, the human-centered foundations of whole-person care.