| | | | Dear ,
Happy New Year from Blue Zones™ Health! We're grateful to start 2026 with you as partners in our mission to transform primary care through lifestyle medicine. Thank you for the dedication you bring to your patients and to this work.
As we look ahead to the year, we're excited about the momentum we're building together and the impact you're making in your communities. | | We’d like to share some important updates with you: Annual Wellness Visit Incentive Program Reminder: Important Deadline! Annual Wellness Visits completed in 2025 must be submitted by January 31, 2026. If you have outstanding visits from last year, please submit them as soon as possible to qualify for the incentive program. 2026's program will be rolled out in February and will be effective for Dates of Services 1/1/26. Please start scheduling members now. For questions about eligibility, incentive amounts, or submission requirements, contact your executive director.
Well‑Being Services (Extension of Primary Care): Well‑Being Services continues to function as a clinically supervised extension of primary care. Offerings include health coaching, social work support, care coordination, nutrition counseling, and lifestyle‑based chronic disease management. Recent improvements include faster referral processing (we can get your patients scheduled with a WBS team member within 48 hours of referral), more consistent provider feedback, and streamlined workflows. Learn more about Well-Being Services here. To refer your patients to Well-being Services, simply use Efax or the ACTY portal.
Community and Virtual Prescriptions: Providers now have simplified pathways to prescribe behavior‑change support through virtual programs and community‑based activities identified and vetted by BZH. To support your patients, actively prescribe or refer them to specific programs that align with their health goals, whether that's stress management classes, walking groups, cooking demonstrations, or nutrition workshops. Once you've made a prescription or referral, you can direct patients to the Blue Zones Health website to register for the programs you've recommended. For in-person, local events, here are the county-specific links:
For details on Virtual Programs (online classes), click here, and for the Virtual Programs at-a-glance calendar, click here.
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New Lifestyle Medicine Board-Certified Providers | | | |
Congratulations to our Blue Zones Health providers who recently passed their Lifestyle Medicine Board Exams: Dr. Peter Mikhail, Los Angeles Dr. Satish Patel, Los Angeles Dr. Paz Eilat, Los Angeles
Dr. Natalie Medina, San Diego
Dr. Fawad Firoz Sheikh, Los Angeles
Board certification in lifestyle medicine represents a significant commitment to advancing clinical expertise in evidence-based lifestyle interventions. These providers have demonstrated mastery in using nutrition, physical activity, stress management, sleep, social connection, and avoidance of risky substances as primary therapeutic tools to prevent, treat, and reverse chronic disease. This achievement reflects the depth of their dedication to the Blue Zones Health model of care, where lifestyle transformation is the foundation of healing rather than an afterthought. We're proud to have these physicians leading the way in demonstrating that lifestyle medicine isn't just a philosophy but a rigorous clinical discipline.
| | | | The 2026 Dietary Guidelines for Americans |
The new Dietary Guidelines for Americans have been released and are generating widespread conversation.
To help you address patient questions, we've created a patient-friendly blog post that cuts through the noise and focuses on what really matters for health. | | | | The post emphasizes that while the guidelines have updated, the foundation of healthy eating remains consistent with Blue Zones Health's evidence-based, plant-forward approach. | | | | | | | |
Here some recent highlights in the world of lifestyle medicine: A December 2025 study published in SLEEP Advances found that insufficient sleep (less than 7 hours per night) was more strongly associated with decreased life expectancy than diet or physical activity, second only to smoking as a behavioral predictor of lifespan. The study analyzed county-level data across the United States from 2019-2025 and found clear correlations between sleep sufficiency and longevity in each year and in most states. Speaking of sleep, an artificial intelligence model developed by Stanford Medicine researchers can predict a person's risk of developing more than 100 health conditions using physiological data from a single night of sleep. Published in Nature Medicine in January 2026, the SleepFM model was trained on nearly 600,000 hours of sleep data from 65,000 participants and successfully identified elevated future risk for conditions including dementia, heart failure, and cancer, often years before clinical diagnosis. A November 2025 study published in BMC Medicine found that long-term exposure to air pollution with PM2.5 levels above 25 μg/m³ significantly reduces the protective health benefits of regular exercise. Among highly active people living in areas with PM2.5 exceeding 25 μg/m³, exercise's protective effect against mortality dropped from 30% to just 12-15%, highlighting the importance of air quality for maximizing exercise benefits. The WHO Commission on Social Connection released a landmark report in June 2025 revealing that one in six people worldwide experiences loneliness, linked to an estimated 871,000 deaths annually. The report found that social connection reduces inflammation and lowers the risk of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, cognitive decline, and early mortality, while loneliness and social isolation double the risk of depression and significantly increase disease risk across multiple conditions. Download the Flagship report or Plain language summary here. An AARP study released in December 2025 found that loneliness among U.S. adults aged 45 and older has risen to 40%, a significant increase from 35% in both 2010 and 2018. The survey results revealed that adults in their 40s and 50s are especially vulnerable, and for the first time, men now report higher rates of loneliness than women (42% vs. 37%). A December 2025 study published in The Lancet Regional Health - Europe tracked over 63,000 adults for an average of 9.1 years and found that high-quality, minimally processed plant foods significantly reduce cardiovascular risk. However, the study showed that ultra-processed plant-based diets can erase these benefits and even increase cardiovascular disease risk by up to 40%. The findings emphasize that the quality and processing level of plant foods matters as much as choosing plant-based options.
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Before you go… Do you know a Blue Zones Health provider who’s doing great work? Let us know! Click here to nominate them as a featured provider! Have an announcement to share with the BZH provider community? Tell us about it!
With cheer and good health, The Blue Zones Health team | | | | Our mailing address is: 4368 Central Ave, Riverside, CA 92506 View in Browser
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