Thank you for joining us for episode 562 of Live Happy Now.

This week, we're celebrating the International Day of Happiness, and one way to do that is by getting out in nature.

I'm your host, Paula Phelps, and today I'm talking with Dr. John Lapuma, a two-time New York

Times best-selling author, board-certified internist, and professionally trained chef who pioneered

culinary medicine. With his new book, Indoor Epidemic, John is teaching us how spending so much

time inside affects our physical and mental health, and he offers simple

evidence-based practices we all can implement to improve our well-being. Let's have a listen.

John, thank you so much for joining me on Live Happy Now.

Paula, pleasure to be here. I was really excited to discover your book because biophilia

and the power of nature is something that I don't think we can talk enough about.

And a lot of times it slips out of our conversations. We just don't think about it.

So to give us a little bit of backstory, can you talk about how you started connecting indoor living with chronic disease and mental health?

My own journey is that of a traditional physician who has done some non-traditional things

inside of the lines of medicine.

So I trained in internal medicine.

I did a fellowship in medical ethics at the University of Chicago.

I taught there for a while and went into practice and moved to California and continued that

after I'd gone to cooking school for a year and taught cooking school and worked in a great

restaurant.

So I felt a little more like I needed to bring what I learned about food and nutrition in cooking school and in a restaurant into medical practice, which helped to result in a field called culinary medicine, which I taught the first medical school course in with my colleague and friend Mike Royzen at the Cleveland Clinic.

And after that, having such interesting

experiences bringing culinary medicine into medicine and feeling its importance to people about

...