Start living your best life!

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.


Get Your 2 Free Downloadable Mini-Books When You Sign Up!

Green Rx & Real Age Excerpt

TOOLS & RESOURCES

Free Healthy Recipes

Chef MD

Quizzes

REFUEL

Healthy Bytes

Search
Generic filters
Exact matches only
Filter by Custom Post Type

Nature Therapy

Nature Therapy Can Heal: Learn More!

What is Nature Therapy?

Everyone knows fresh air is good for you. But did you know that exercising outside or in view of outside is more effective than exercising inside? Or that dementia gardens can improve memory? Or that PTSD and ADHD can improve with nature guidance?
Nature therapy describes the idea of healing our physical and mental illnesses by immersing ourselves in nature. We often find excuses to spend time outdoors due to our hectic schedules, but we can use nature to make ourselves healthier people.
How does nature work? Behavioral activation? Cortisol, vitamin D and serotonin level change?
Phytoncide inhalation? Immune system desensitization? All of the above?
The science of specific environments (blue or green, garden or meadow, VR or forest) is just being revealed. But studying and then prescribing specific nature therapies is reasonable, smart and innovative. Here’s a primer I wrote about Culinary Medicine and Nature: Foods That Work Together: it’s one of the most popular pieces published in the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine.

Nature As Medicine

The 20/20/20 Rule For Protecting Eye Health

30% of the world is currently myopic (or near-sighted) and over 50% could be by 2050. In the United States alone, myopia has doubled in the last three decades. The rise of myopia is mostly due to spending more time online and less time in nature. Check out this one

5 Nature Places You Need to Check Out This Month

Want to make this month the best one yet? Instead of adding more tasks to your to-do list or more events to your calendar, add more nature to your life. Nature holds a variety of physical, cognitive, and emotional health benefits and while there are plenty of studies to support

This Natural Anxiety Remedy is a Must For These Influencers

If you’re feeling stressed, anxious, or frustrated, you should turn to nature. Yet so few of us actually do. Instead, we turn to social media, food, work, Netflix, and everything which hinders our connection with nature and ourselves. How would you feel if you replaced one hour of Netflix with

The Anxiety Cure Top Medical Experts Are Raving About

Nature has the power to heal. It’s an innate truth many of us know, but one which is hard to practice in the modern world. So many of us work in front of computer screens and then leave work, only to scroll socials or watch Netflix. In fact, Americans spend

Your Brain on Nature: How Time Outside Transforms Your Prefrontal Cortex

Have you ever spent an entire afternoon inside scrolling on TikTok? Afterwards, you probably feel tired, disoriented, and had trouble focusing. These feelings are technology fatigue and it’s not harmless–it has serious side effects to the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex is responsible for many cognitive functions. It allows you

5 Ways Nature Therapy Can Transform Your Health

In a world of Zoom calls, late nights watching Netflix, and social media scrolling, we’ve lost touch with the natural world around us. The average American spends 93% of their time inside (and that stat was before the pandemic) and 2 out of 5 Americans report feelings of anxiety and

Culinary Medicine and Nature Therapy Connect Through What You Eat

Dr La Puma with Dr Oz

Plants, Entrees, and Autonomy: Make Yourself Happier with How You Live.

Write A GreenRX… presented to MDVIP’s Annual National Meeting

Key Nature Therapy SubSpecialties

Animal Assisted Therapy

Blue Care

Care Farms

  • CareFarming UK (Care Farming UK)
  • Current Status and Potential for Care Farms (NJAS – Wageningen Journal of Life Sciences)

Culinary Medicine

Ecotherapy

 

Green Care

Forest Walking/ Shinrin-Yoku

Nature Deficit Disorder

Therapeutic Horticulture

Executive Summary

 

Get Dr. La Puma’s Healthy Bytes Every Monday!

Newsletter Bonus: get more about nature therapy, your garden, kitchen medicine cabinet, healthy recipes and a FREE Download of How to Use Nature to Look, Feel And Actually Be Less Stressed, Healthier and Happier (a primer) when you sign up!