1KHO 825: Take Back Your Biology From the Clutches of the Indoor World | Dr. John La Puma, Indoor Epidemic

**Ginny Yurich** (0:00)
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Welcome to the 1000 Hours Outside Podcast. My name is Ginny Yurich and it's on our 1000 Hours Outside. And I have just read an incredible book. It is called Indoor Epidemic. And the author is so accomplished. Dr. John La Puma, a board certified internist, trained chef, trained chef, Chef MD, and a regenerative farmer who pioneered the culinary medicine movement. A two time New York Times bestselling author. He's lectured at Harvard, University of Chicago, and Ted Med, a host for PBS and Lifetime TV, featured in the Wall Street Journal and on CNN. The physician leading the charge behind Outdoor RX, Outdoor Prescription, the evidence-based response to the indoor epidemic. What an honor, Dr. John La Puma. Welcome.

**John La Puma** (1:59)
Ginny, I want you to come and do announcing for me. You're just amazing.

**Ginny Yurich** (2:03)
I can just record it and send it off. And here's John. I mean, this is so important. The book is fantastic. I took so many pages of notes. Can you give us a history of how you got interested in all of these topics? This is a wide breadth of topics. So being an internist, the regenerative farmer, and also really interested in food, trained chef.

**John La Puma** (2:25)
I see them all as a continuum in medicine. I'm traditionally trained in internal medicine at the UCLA and the University of Chicago. And I have always liked seeing what's outside the borders of medicine and trying to bring it inside, if it makes sense to me.
And so food has always made sense to me. My career in medical ethics before then made sense to me, still does, and farming and gardening.
And I know there in Michigan, you have beautiful gardens. There have, it makes sense to me, especially now over the last 15 years where I've transformed a abandoned nursery into an urban regenerative certified organic farm where we grow a little bit of everything and teach how to grow to things and kind of skills based courses in nature as medicine as well as private tours and the like. For me, this is all of the continuum, ethics and food and gardening or farming, all actually ought to be brought into medicine. My interest has always been to try to find the science behind it, why it makes sense, what actually the mechanism is, why specific foods work as medicine, why specific time outdoors works to lower your blood pressure, lower your cortisol, improve your mood and memory and focus, and insulin resistance and immune problems. And in this book, I cite 100 references to show that, in fact, it does work. And so I'm going to tell you in this hour that we have together a little bit about the science of why this works, because I know your audience already knows that it's great to be outside, and it's restorative, and it's powerful, and it feels therapeutic and preventive, but why?
So that's what we work on.

**Ginny Yurich** (4:13)
It's fantastic. And I love the way that you set the book up, John. So this is Indoor Epidemic. The subtitle is 93% Inside. That's what people say, you know, we're 93% inside or in cars. It's still sleep, it focus in years, and the 7% outdoor prescription is what restores them. And so I love the premise of missions. So you say this is your field manual for analog wellness, take back your biology from the clutches of the indoor world. And so then you have all these missions. Mission one is greet the morning sun. Mission two is about space and the sky and the sea and all the blue outside. Mission three is forest bathing. So you go through all these seven missions in the book and talk about the different statistics and you use the phrase, this is such a great phrase, ultra-processed time. I never heard anybody say that, but it is so similar to ultra-processed food in that it's not really giving us what we want.