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.
Nobody likes social distancing, but one of my personal favorite “silver linings” to this moment in time is how many people are turning towards home gardening and how to make your new home garden organic. Starting a home garden is great for so many reasons—it’s good for your [...]
This is the 40 minute invited “The Science of Nature as Medicine”, guest lecture (zoom video) to Harvard’s “Introduction to Lifestyle Medicine” course I taught in January 2020, with 20 minutes of questions. Many of the references for the studies I cite can be found in [...]
Healthy Bites: Cold Relief There’s a nasty cold making the rounds right now that I’ve seen take down friends and loved ones for weeks at time. We all know there are myriad products that promise to reduce symptoms, from decongestants, cough suppressants, and pain relieving medicines. But [...]
Who can resist the juicy, vibrant flavor of a sweet and tangy pineapple? Apparently, not many of us—this prickly plant often ranks as one of America’s most in-demand tropical fruits. But beneath its rough exterior, the pineapple is hiding more than just flavor. There are many health [...]
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 [...]
Welcome to the next installment of our biweekly series on the many different kinds of nature therapy. This week’s topic is gardening for dementia. So what is gardening for dementia? Unlike some of the other topics we’ve covered, this one is a little easier to guess the meaning behind; [...]
Our series of deep dives on the various kinds of nature therapy continues with our eighth blog. This week, our topic is therapeutic horticulture, also known as horticultural therapy. What is it? In a nutshell, therapeutic horticulture involves the use of garden environments as a therapeutic [...]
In this week’s installment of our series of deep dives on the various kinds of nature therapy, we’ll be taking a closer look at care farms. What are care farms? Simply put, a care farm involves the therapeutic use of farming practices to facilitate healing. Also known as green [...]
Hopefully you’ve been following (and enjoying!) our bi-weekly series on the many different kinds of nature therapy. This week, our spotlight lands on blue care, a field adjacent to water therapy and aquatic therapy. Blue care is a subset of nature therapy that champions the power of water to [...]
Today’s deep dive on one of the many kinds of nature therapy is a personal favorite of mine: pet therapy, also known as animal-assisted therapy. Those of us who have had the pleasure of caring for a pet—whether it be a dog, cat, bird or rabbit—already know implicitly the [...]
