Dr. John La Puma: Why Being Indoors Is Aging You Faster (And the 17-Minute Morning Fix) | #151

**Dr. Vonda Wright** (0:00)
Telomere shortening is one of the hallmarks of aging. It's an inevitable biological process that we can change epigenetically due to our behaviors. You are aging faster because you're indoors due to this indoor epidemic.

**Dr. John La Puma** (0:12)
It's actually up to six years premature aging.

**Dr. Vonda Wright** (0:15)
Dr. John La Puma, a legend in academic medicine, the thought leader in culinary medicine.

**Dr. John La Puma** (0:22)
Almost everybody who lives in the modern world is circadian disruptive. Their circadian rhythms are not aligned with the morning light because very few people get out and do this deliberately anymore.

**Dr. Vonda Wright** (0:33)
You're telling me that on average we can change our health by being outside an extra 17 to 30 minutes a day.

**Dr. John La Puma** (0:41)
People who spend an hour a week gardening have a drop in Heavoclobid A1c by 0.5%.

**Dr. Vonda Wright** (0:48)
Oh, that is significant. I'm very excited today, those of you that are listening, to have a legend in academic medicine, in creating entire fields of study, in currently raising in this green earth crops of his own, Dr. John La Puma, who is an academic clinician, went to some of the same schools, including University of Chicago that I did. You're an internist, you're a trained chef, organic farmer, and have been credited as the father, air quote father, but really the originator, the thought leader in culinary medicine, which for years and years as an orthopedic surgeon, I'm like mobility is first, and then sleep is king, because of course, as physicians, when we trained, we had no sleep, because we were before the work hour restriction. But nothing matters unless we realize that our bodies are not garbage cans, and that it matters how we treat ourselves, right? So I am thrilled to have you today, because my core demographic are the people who really make most of the food and healthcare decisions in this country, 35 to 65 year old women, because we make the decisions for everybody we love and care about. And when I was thinking about having you on, I thought, you know what, it is what you're saying about in your new book, The Indoor Epidemic is so important. I grew up on a farm in Kansas, where we had a five-acre garden. I'm all about dirt on my feet, and yet I've raised all of our children in the city. So they're missing out on that very thing that was so important to me.

**Dr. John La Puma** (2:44)
That's a huge garden, five acres is-

**Dr. Vonda Wright** (2:46)
You know what? My dad was a little crazy. We had 3,000 asparagus plants, for goodness sakes, but we cut them all by hand. It was amazing.

**Dr. John La Puma** (2:55)
That is awesome.

**Dr. Vonda Wright** (2:57)
It is awesome.

**Dr. John La Puma** (2:58)
At my little farm, we have asparagus too. We don't have 5,000 plants. We have about 25, and they're in a purple patch where I planted behind the culinary garden, which is rosemary and lemon verbena and Mexican oregano, and a lot of herbs that I use on a daily basis, marjoram, everything that's purple. It's the only part of the farm that isn't completely edible.
Except for this part, the purple asparagus, which are in front. We were talking about the UFC earlier. You're going to talk at the UFC about nature-based medicine and this whole idea, that being indoors 93% of the time is not only disrupting your biology, but changing the way that we are as a species and we have to reverse it. And I asked, what happens, which vegetable blooms into a firm with red berries? You know, the smartest people in the world, as you know, at the UFC. And not one person in this 250-person audience could answer this. And I wouldn't have believed it unless I saw it. Of course, asparagus.

**Dr. Vonda Wright** (4:03)
It's asparagus, yeah.

**Dr. John La Puma** (4:04)
Asparagus burns, which birds love the seeds of because they're bright red. And they're not edible, sadly, but they are beautiful. And we often let ours go four feet high, then to wave in the wind, and use as a barrier for the rest of the purple patch, where there are butterfly peas and purple sages and hummingbird sages and lots of other purple plants.

**Dr. Vonda Wright** (4:27)
And this is on the West Coast.

**Dr. John La Puma** (4:30)
This is in Santa Barbara, where I live, about a mile from the ocean. And we constructed, I constructed, an abandoned nursery, which had rusting car hulks and old buildings. And that was literally abandoned. And I refashioned it into an educational farm, which is now certified organic for 30 different crops. And we sell primarily to Michelin star restaurants and chefs in the area. And I used as a laboratory and canvas for writing this new book, Indoor Epidemic, to try out a lot of my ideas and to help and to see if it worked. When people came for tours or came for events, I would try different things that I wrote about in the book about morning light, for example, and about having your hands, as you just described, and your feet in the soil.