Zach Burns, DO, MPH is a family physician in Rochester, NY. He became an herbivore in college, when philosophy classes exposed him to the reality of factory farming.
Upon graduation, Zach worked as a community organizer for MASSPIRG and learned first-hand the power of food and energy companies that prefer things as they are. He then served an Americorps placement at East Boston Neighborhood Health Center, working with mainly Hispanic patients on social barriers to health. Limited funds, education, and access to healthy food was manifest in their rates and complications of ‘diabesity’. Interested in chronic disease and enamored by Hispanic culture, he ventured to South Florida for medical school.
Zach’s medical school years were defined by organizing classmates around plant-based nutrition. He delved into the physiology of food, studying the mechanisms by which standard fare causes disease while whole plant foods prevent it. As founder of the student organization Plant-based Healthcare, Zach invited the renowned Dr. Michael Klaper to speak on campus, leading to their invaluable partnership in Moving Medicine Forward. Zach now serves as Associate Director for MMF with the mission of cultivating a generation of nutritionally aware physicians who are prepared to tackle our chronic disease burden.
Zach pursued similar goals on the Trainee Executive Board of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine. As founding Plant-based Health Liaison for Medical Students for a Sustainable Future, he engaged peers in learning and advocacy around food systems, zoonotic disease, and climate change. Zach supports universal healthcare as an adjunct to improved nutrition policy, and helped launch a chapter of Students for a National Health Program in medical school. He earned a concomitant MPH to be best equipped for the food fights ahead.
Zach returned to the northeast for family medicine residency in Rhode Island where he cherished the full-spectrum training in primary care, pediatrics, obstetrics, and hospital medicine. But presiding over the horrific, preventable complications of chronic disease and addiction reaffirmed that lifestyle medicine is a public health necessity. In residency he taught a nutrition jumpstart with Plant Docs, cofounded Shop with a Doc, led a dining task force to significantly reform the hospital menu, and advocated for animals in the street and the state legislature.
Zach continues to be amazed by the capacity of whole, plant foods to predictably reverse many major human diseases. As he begins a career in family and lifestyle medicine, Zach hopes to engage with you on all of the above.
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