BY PHOEBE HALL | PHOTOGRAPHY: KAREN PHILIPPI
Humans weren’ t made to live indoors. Could a dose of nature be the cure for what ails us?
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Pooja Tandon, MD, MPH, can still vividly recall the day more than 10 years ago that transformed her research on child health.
The Brown alumna, now a pediatrician in Seattle, had brought her boys, who were 2 and 5 at the time, for a day at the beach. As they dug in the sand for hours, Tandon dug into her book, Last Child in the Woods, in which author Richard Louv coins the term“ nature-deficit disorder” to describe how our society’ s decreasing exposure to the outdoors harms children and all of us.
As she read— without interruption, for the first time in years— Tandon thought back to the times her sons and other kids would act out after too much time inside, yet they behaved and played nicely when they could go outside and“ move their little bodies.” She remembered her very urban upbringing in Lucknow, India, where she nevertheless spent most of her time outdoors, on her grandparents’ rooftop terrace, soaking up the sun on cool winter days and sleeping“ under the stars” when it was too hot inside in the summer.
The book, and her experience reading it, were“ transformational,” Tandon says.“ I was sitting at a beach with my kids playing uninterrupted for a long stretch, and really recognizing that, wow, there’ s something to this that has made parenting easier for me, while promoting our health and our well-being, for both of us.”
Preventive medicine drew Tandon to Brown’ s Warren Alpert Medical School, she says, and she chose pediatrics“ because of this immense capacity to influence health early in life.” She was already studying and promoting physical activity for kids when she read Last Child in the Woods, so investigating the health benefits of time outdoors and in nature was a logical extension of her research.
“ As a scientist myself, I was curious. Although this feels like the right thing, what is the evidence around it?” Tandon recalls thinking. She knows firsthand how little time clinicians have with each patient, how they must prioritize what topics to discuss and what advice to give in each encounter.“ We want to focus on things that are evidence based and are going to influence health,” she says.
Tandon and some colleagues combed through the literature on nature contact and health. They found hundreds of studies, of adults and of children, but no systematic review of the research on kids’ health. So they wrote it. Their 2021 paper, published in Pediatrics, includes almost 300 articles and categorizes different types of exposure to nature and their health outcomes. The findings were overwhelmingly positive.
“ The list of benefits of outdoor time for children and adults is long, and it includes things like healthier vitamin D levels, healthier weight status, better concentration for those with ADHD, lower blood pressure, lower stress,” Tandon said in a 2023 TEDx Talk. Time in nature also correlates with less depression and anxiety; better pregnancy outcomes; even lower rates of nearsightedness.
“ That systematic review definitely was the foundation of what I’ ve been able to do since then,” Tandon says, including her 2024 book, Digging Into Nature: Outdoor Adventures for Happier and Healthier Kids, coauthored with Danette Swanson Glassy, MD.
Yet Tandon is wary of a blanket prescription for nature. People are busy; some don’ t have safe spaces outside near their homes.“ Equity in access to green spaces and nature is an important part of promoting health equity,” she says. Plus there are health risks outdoors: air pollution, wildfire smoke, allergens like pollen, extreme heat and cold, insect bites and stings, and poisonous plants, to name a few. Some people have physical limitations that may restrict their
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