John La Puma is the “food as medicine doc.” A board-certified specialist in internal medicine, a professionally trained chef and New York Times best-selling author, Dr. La Puma hosts “What’s Cooking With ChefMD®” every Sunday morning on the national TV series “Health Corner” on the cable TV network Lifetime, with 88 million subscribers.

A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of California (Creative Studies) and a graduate of the Baylor College of Medicine, he performed his residency in internal medicine at the West LA VA Medical Center and UCLA, and completed the first postgraduate fellowship in internal medicine and clinical medical ethics in the U.S., at the University of Chicago. He was appointed to the associate faculty at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine for six years and has written more than 50 peer reviewed scientific papers, 200 essays and letters, and three medical books.

Dr. La Puma is also a graduate of the Cooking and Hospitality Institute of Chicago, a Le Cordon Bleu School, and taught the first Nutrition and Cooking Course for Medical Students in the U.S., at SUNY. He founded CHEF Clinic® to study the cooking, eating and fitness habits of overweight adults, receiving an American Medical Association grant for the research. He served as a Professor of Nutrition at Kendall School of Culinary Arts and cooked for nearly 4 years once weekly at Chef Rick Bayless’ Topolobampo in Chicago. Dr. La Puma contributed recipes to the #1 best-seller You, the Owner’s Manual and has consulted with companies such as CIGNA, Caremark and Kraft.

Dr. La Puma’s first popular book became a New York Times best-seller: The RealAge Diet: Make Yourself Younger with What You Eat; his first cookbook became an Amazon #1 Cookbook: Cooking the RealAge Way. Both were co-authored with Michael Roizen, MD, and published by HarperCollins. Dr. La Puma’s work has been featured on Oprah, Good Morning America, Today, Montel, and hundreds of other national shows. He has appeared on NBC, CBS, ABC, FOX, PBS and CNN outlets nationwide, and in dozens of national magazines, including Eating Well, Health, Martha Stewart Living, Men’s Journal, More, Newsweek, Parade, Prevention, Reader's Digest, Self, Shape, USA Today and Vogue.

Named "One of America's Top Physicians" by the Consumers' Research Council and a "Secret Weapon" by The Wall Street Journal, Dr. La Puma received the National Association of Medical Communicators’ Award of Excellence in 2007. His new book, ChefMD’s Big Book of Culinary Medicine (Crown) will be published in April 2008, and has been selected for nine national book clubs pre-publication. He sees patients with the Santa Barbara Institute for Medical Nutrition & Healthy Weight, and is based in Santa Barbara, California.