James Rippe

James M. Rippe (born June 26, 1947) is an American cardiologist. He is the founder and director of the Rippe Lifestyle Institute, located in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, and professor of biomedical sciences at the University of Central Florida.

Rippe received his B.A. from Harvard College in 1969 and his M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1979.

From 1983 to 1993, Rippe worked at the Exercise Physiology and Nutrition Laboratory at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He was an associate professor of medicine at Tufts University from 1994 to 2012. He has been a professor of biomedical sciences at the University of Central Florida since 2005.

Rippe's research has found that the health benefits of exercise extend to mild exercise, such as walking, and that the benefit from walking is about the same regardless of the speed of walking. He has been described as "a founder of the fitness walking movement." He has said that the adverse health effects of physical inactivity are comparable to those of smoking a pack of cigarettes per day.

High fructose corn syrup research

Rippe has worked with the food industry on the health effects of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), and he has said that there is no link between HFCS and obesity. In 2014, it was reported that Rippe had received about $10 million over the course of four years from the Corn Refiners Association, after which he released a number of studies disputing the adverse health effects of HFCS, some of which argued that it was not nutritionally different from sugar.

Rippe is the editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine, as well as the co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Intensive Care Medicine.