Dr. John La Puma
- Helps audiences combat burnout, brain fog, and fatigue by transforming their everyday environment and habits.
- Board-certified internist and two-time New York Times bestselling author pioneering Culinary Medicine and Nature-as-Medicine.
- Professionally trained chef, regenerative farmer, and TEDMED speaker specializing in health, wellness, and human performance.
Dr. John La Puma Speaker Biography
Dr. John La Puma tells audiences why they are tired, foggy, and burned out, and what to do about it. His answer is not in their heads. It is in their habitat.
He is a board-certified internist and two-time New York Times bestselling author, with more than one million copies in print in eight languages. In 2003 he taught the first Culinary Medicine class in a US medical school. The field he pioneered is now taught in roughly 80 percent of them. In 2025 he built and led the first skills-based Nature-as-Medicine CME in the United States, for UCLA. Physicians who took it lowered their blood pressure 10.3 percent in one day.
He has spoken at TEDMED and twice at TEDx, and been featured in The New York Times, which adopted his phrase “ultraprocessed time.” After one short talk, Edelman put all five of its New York offices outside every Wednesday at noon.
A professionally trained chef, he also runs a USDA Certified Organic regenerative farm in Santa Barbara. His latest book, Indoor Epidemic: 93% Inside Steals Sleep, Focus & Years—The 7% Outdoor Rx Restores Them (Wellness Imprints, 2026), won the 2026 International Book Award in Health and was the subject of an August 2026 episode of The Oprah Podcast.
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Speech Topics
You’re Living Like a Zoo Animal: Captivity Biology and the Real Cause of Burnout
Your people are tired, foggy and short-tempered. They call it burnout. They also spend 93% of their lives indoors. No horizon, stale air, a box. Dr. La Puma shows what that does to sleep, attention and mood, and gives the smallest dose of outdoor time the evidence supports: 17 minutes a day, or 2 hours a week. After one short talk, Edelman put all five of its New York offices outside every Wednesday at noon.
Ultraprocessed Time: Why Smart Teams Cannot Focus
The New York Times adopted his phrase. Ultraprocessed time is the hours spent indoors and on screens, without daylight, distance or other people. It is convenient. It costs sleep, attention and decision quality. Leaders learn to spot it on a calendar, and what to change without changing work hours.
The 17-Minute Prescription: An Outdoor Rx a Team Can Start on Monday
The objection is time. Nobody has any. This asks for 17 minutes. Built on a review of 2,200 studies: morning daylight, distance for the eyes, a walk at noon. No new apps. No guesswork. In a four-week pilot with a desk workforce, burnout scores dropped significantly (p = .018).
