Get Dr La Puma's Healthy Bites & Weekly Wows in your inbox to help you feel your best inside and out. Insights, healthy recipes and recommended household, culinary, literary, botanical and natural products to make your life easier, healthier and more fun.
Green Rx is a nature-based prescription. It can include 5 (five) parts: A. lower-on-the-food-chain-food (e.g. grown, harvested, minimally processed, cooked locally), B. nature therapy (from forest bathing to surf therapy to therapeutic gardening to time with animals), C. aromatherapy, D. dietary [...]
Pistachios are robust in many nutrients that support healthy brain function. They are a great source of Vitamin B6, which can be quite low in people who have depression. B6 plays a role in energy production and helps the body make the brain chemicals (neurotransmitters) serotonin and norepinephrine [...]
Treat your liver well and it will treat you well in return, keeping liver detox humming in the background and protecting you from liver disease and other poisonings. Read on to learn how to take care of your liver, stop liver disease, and start liver detox. One of our [...]
Breath in. Breath out. We do it automatically, about 22,000 times per day. Until we can’t. For millions of adults and children, taking a deep breath is a struggle; for those who can breathe easily, the power of the breath is often taken for granted. Yet our lungs have [...]
I’ve devoted several blogs to the Mediterranean Diet–its affect on cholesterol, on Alzheimer’s prevention, its red wine and palliation near the end of life, and its easy, rustic preparations. The mechanisms of the Mediterranean diet remain elusive: whether it is because of its [...]
With all the confusion about what to eat, and with how often nutrition experts seem to change their minds, I thought it was time to go back to basic culinary medicine and see if I could find groups of recipes and actual foods for specific chronic conditions. In other [...]
Happy to announce my new CulinaryRx Series I’m hosting with MedPage Today. We answer “What eating plan would you recommend for this patient, and why? Which foods and beverages should she avoid, and choose?” Check out the text Q+A, video, transcription, youtube link, reader [...]
The Foodbank of Santa Barbara work I’ve been privileged to participate in has taught me a lot: especially that food insecurity is actually an undiagnosed but treatable medical problem. Why haven’t I recognized it as such until recently? Maybe because so much of what clinicians see has [...]
Good diet foods for high blood pressure include blueberries, flax meal, hibiscus or jamaica tea, and beet juice. But high blood pressure management starts with measuring it accurately: I recommend the Omron Series 7 for home. These foods all have very good peer-reviewed medical research that shows [...]
In nutrition, there are three concerns to address: information, money/resources, and time. Information, though not easy, is usually the least difficult problem to solve. People want to know which foods lower cholesterol or blood sugar; which nutrients interact with their medications; whether olive [...]