Chicago may be famous for pizza that weighs a pound, drips cheese and oozes tomato sauce, but John La Puma would like to suggest an alternative, healthier take on the city’s signature dish.
By traditional standards, he concedes, it is a rather peculiar pie.
A mere 2 to 4 ounces of part-skim Monterey jack cheese dot the top of the pizza, intended for six. Tucked under that familiar cover lie a few surprises: Swiss chard and purslane–somewhat uncommon greens–toasted walnuts and caramelized onions.
As La Puma proffers the pizza to about a dozen willing tasters one recent evening, he is greeted by a wide range of reactions. Pure skepticism radiates from the 18-year-old gazing upon her first chard-and-purslane pizza. But irrepressible enthusiasm lights the smile of the 32-year-old who has lost 70 pounds cooking such foods and is eager to taste yet another unexpected combination of flavors.
“It looks like a stuffed pizza but it’s not,” La Puma said of the pie, which looks typical on top. “Let’s see how it tastes.”
Everybody at least nibbles the pizza. Everybody takes another bite. More than a few pronounce it “delicious.”
“Why can you use less cheese?” he asks the group. “Because your eye feeds you. Your eye thinks, `Oh, it’s cheesy. I’m going to like it.’ These are culinary tricks to use.”
La Puma is a doctor and this–the kitchen–is his favorite clinic.
There, deftly wielding a chef’s knife and a doctor’s knowledge, he treats patients by getting to what he believes lies at the root of many medical problems: food.
About a decade ago, the 43-year-old internist took a break from seeing patients and enrolled in cooking school. He then trained under acclaimed chef Rick Bayless, who owns and operates the Frontera Grill and Topolobampo in Chicago.
“I needed to reassess, to figure out how to combine the passions of trying to care for people and value their choices and do it in a way that involved food, which I thought was at the root of common medical problems,” La Puma said.
Now back in practice, La Puma has established a program called CHEF (Cooking, Healthy Eating and Fitness) Clinic at Alexian Brothers Medical Center in Elk Grove Village. The clinic offers several options. The most thorough takes patients through a detailed medical exam, and then a seven-week educational program of learning to cook, grocery shop and dine out, as well as develop mind-body skills and a personal fitness plan. A less detailed program featuring just the cooking classes also is offered.
A dietitian, chef, exercise physiologist and other health professionals also work in the CHEF clinic. La Puma has been tracking some of those who go through his programs, and reports that their average weight has fallen more than 12 pounds, they’ve lost inches off waist and hips, lowered their blood pressure, done more cooking and exercise and increased their intake of fruits and vegetables.
La Puma’s path from clinic to kitchen and back stretches the length of his career. He has, at least vaguely, been dissatisfied with the way medicine was practiced since he was a medical student in Los Angeles two decades ago.
“I went to medical school because you had to go to medical school to be a doctor,” he said. “And being a doctor seemed the best way of caring for people and learning their stories.”
But it wasn’t people’s life stories La Puma learned. It was their vital signs.
“We knew them by their room numbers and their lab values rather than who they were, their diseases, their families,” he said.
That dissatisfaction propelled him into the first medical fellowship in the country for doctors who wanted to study medical ethics, a program offered at the University of Chicago. As part of the program, La Puma took specialized courses in ethics, case law, economics, public policy and medicine–including the fields of neurology, surgery and pediatrics. La Puma went on to foster a medical ethics program at Lutheran General Hospital in Park Ridge, practicing general medicine plus counseling and research on medical ethics. At the time, in the late 1980s and early ’90s, the field of medical ethics was exploding as more people and medical programs began more openly to consider matters of death and dying.
“It was extremely satisfying work, and I was quite devoted to it,” La Puma said.
Still, he said, there were glimmers of dissatisfaction.
“It seemed I was being helpful toward the end of life, but not making much of a difference in the middle or at the beginning,” he said. “I felt I needed to try to make a difference sooner than when a person is in a hospital bed that they may never leave.”
He believes he is more effective now because he is blending his doctoring and cooking skills. And some of his patients agree with that assessment.
Linda Mendoza has lost 70 pounds, half of that since she became a patient under La Puma’s guidance.
“My typical eating habits were junk food and more of it,” she said as she practiced cooking some of La Puma’s recipes during a recent class. “I now know how to cook high-flavor, low-fat foods and I would never have thought that being on a healthy diet would taste so good.”
Mendoza’s cooking partner, Laura Kowalski-Bliss of Schaumburg, said she has her husband and friends trying La Puma’s dishes–even when they’d rather fall back on high-fat favorites.
“Resistance is futile,” she joked. “I just tell my husband, `This is what we’re having for dinner.’ Since he doesn’t have to cook, he doesn’t object.”
Still, La Puma is a realist. For one thing, he has been there; once more than 30 pounds overweight, he now carries no more than 145 pounds on his 5-foot-6-inch frame. For another, much of his career has been devoted to counseling patients in one form or another. He knows how difficult long-term change can be.
So call him an optimistic realist.
“On a philosophical level, I would like people to make huge changes. People don’t make huge changes from one day to the next, but it is not difficult to make small ones,” La Puma said. “And small changes make a difference.”
Three times a week, he suggests, eat rolled oats with fresh berries instead of sugary commercial cereal. Next week, try drinking a bit less soda pop. Slip in an extra serving of vegetables here and there. And give soy a chance.
On a recent hot summer day, La Puma stood before a group of about two dozen surgeons at Alexian Brothers Medical Center talking about healthy eating, urging them to counsel patients about food and nutrition.
And now comes an experiment of sorts. An assistant passes around glasses of a silky smooth chocolate drink. La Puma is upfront–it’s a soy-fruit blend. But taste it, he urges. Just taste it.
A few of the doctors sniff suspiciously. A handful have clearly tasted soy before and down the drink without hesitation.
La Puma gently urges bottoms-up among the non-compliant, noting: “This recipe is simple. You put stuff in a blender. You hit the button.”
Besides, he adds, doctors cannot, in good conscience, just tell patients not to eat bad stuff. They have to offer healthy alternatives that they, themselves, eat regularly and enjoy.
The last few holdouts taste the drink. Smiles all around. Says one, astonished, “It’s good.”
After La Puma finishes speaking, one of the surgeons, Dr. Michael Kennedy, admits he almost didn’t stay for La Puma’s talk, but is glad he did. He even picked up a copy of the low fat chocolate soy shake recipe and other literature.
Will he make the drink at home?
“It’s too soon to tell, but instead of leaving the literature on the desk I’m taking it with me,” he said. “That’s a start.”
Or, as La Puma would say, a small change, something that, at least for now, he finds satisfying.
“I like what I’m doing now,” the soft-spoken doctor said. “I’m interested in it and challenged by it and I’m trying not to have many expectations about what I’ll learn next because it’s always something I don’t expect.”
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For more information on Dr. John La Puma’s CHEF Clinic, call 847-956-6433. He can be reached via e-mail at info@CHEFClinic.com, or visit the Web site at www.CHEFClinic.com.
