Tell me about your vision.
I'm passionate about women's health
and normalizing male physiology
as the standard default version of physiology.
Because for so long in medicine and science,
male physiology has been treated as the normal
and then female as sort of the side issue.
But through my background as a biologist
and then a naturopathic doctor,
I've just come to reframe that
as female physiology as normal.
And that has given me a lot of traction
over the decades with my patients
and of course with my audiences, with my book,
just discussing in detail how different aspects of health
are different for women.
Yeah, thank you for sharing that.
This field, Lara, is unique.
I mean, I've seen a lot of medicine doctor
be in that field.
I mean, that's very common.
But going out of the way and using natural remedies
to help women in this area, how did that come about?
And what was the journey like?
Where did you choose that path?
Yeah, good question.
Actually, I started out as a biologist.
So I always see everything through that lens.
And then as I was on the path
to become a research biologist,
I decided I wanted to work more with people.
So I entered the program of naturopathic medicine in Canada,
which is very similar to normal medicine,
but using nutrition, herbal medicine, lifestyle changes.
And yeah, from the beginning,
I found that approach can work very well for lots of things,
not for everything, of course,
but it can work very well for many kinds of conditions,
especially a lot of the women's health,
menstrual conditions that I started to see
when I entered practice.
So did you ever go to med school at all?
Was that part of your journey?
Well, it's a parallel training program.
So in North America, naturopathic medicine,
it is a medical school, but it's a different path
than traditional medical school.
That makes sense.
Yeah.
So what would you say, Lara, is your why?
Like why this specific field?
My main goal is to have better periods,
better hormones, in many cases,
without the use of hormonal birth control.
So that has been a big part of my work, of my books,
challenging the narrative around that
and establishing what I feel is the truth,
that women's hormones are beneficial
and not something to be routinely switched off
with medication, as in the case of hormonal birth control.
So that's been a big driving force.
And a lot of my patients have wanted over the years.
So I've been happy to be able to deliver effective strategies
that work for that.
Yeah.
So can you tell me more about that a little bit?
Yeah.
So the current narrative, it's been about, I guess,
50 or 60 years has been this idea that it's okay
to switch off women's hormones
with hormonal birth control
and then replace those hormones with medications
that are kind of similar to estrogen and progesterone,
but really in lots of ways quite different,
especially in their effects on the brain
and metabolism and cardiovascular health.
The medications and hormonal birth control
are not as beneficial as estrogen and progesterone
for all of those things.
And so, seeing that through my biologist lens,
I just realized this doesn't make any sense.
This would be like saying to men, young men,
hundreds of millions of young men around the world,
we're just gonna give you this medication
that switches off your hormonal functions,
which is off your testosterone,
and we're gonna then give back this medication
that's kind of like testosterone, but not really.
And that obviously would be crazy
if we talked about doing that for men,
but that's essentially what's happened for women.
So that's been a big part of my work.
And it's interesting to see over the decades,
the attitude in the world change around that.
Even 10 years ago, it was very taboo
to say anything about hormonal birth control.
Now, in 2025, it's a lot more known
and a lot more people are talking about it.
So for me, it's been kind of great to be part of that change
and I would say growing awareness
of the possibility of doing things differently for women.
What would you say that along the lines
of the hormonal birth control,
what are the negative side effects of that?
Because I wanna know,
because I think that relates to the why of like,
I'm assuming gonna avoid that for women
and also them have healthier life.
What is that?
Well, that's my why is to hopefully deliver,
help women be healthy in their own bodies
and have their own hormones.
You could do sort of a laundry list of side effects,
potentially of hormonal birth control.
A lot of people talked about it in those terms,
but for me, again, as a biologist,
the main thing is that it's a medication
that switches off ovarian function.
And women actually need their ovaries
to be producing hormones.
It seems kind of obvious when it's stated in those terms,
but that's unfortunately,
the sort of strange paradigm that we've had
over the last three or four generations
that maybe women don't need those.
It's sort of idea that you don't need your ovaries
or you don't need a progesterone
until you're ready to make a baby.
But again, to give you an analogy for men,
that would be like saying to men,
you don't need your testicles
or you don't need testosterone
until you're ready to make a baby.
And obviously that would be crazy.
So that's, yeah, I feel like that's the same for women.
I mean, so just to give some concrete examples,
we do know that the pill affects mood long-term,
not just while you're taking it potentially,
but because it potentially alters the shape of the brain,
which makes sense because hormones act on the brain.
And also we do know what science we have,
which is not as much science
as we should have on this topic,
but we do know that young women
who take hormonal birth control
don't reach what's called peak bone density.
So around, normally if everything's going well
and puberty is going well and hormones are there,
then women should have the strongest bones
they're ever gonna have by about their,
you know, mid to early to mid 20s.
That's called peak bone density.
And then, you know, from that point,
we just slowly lose bone over the decades,
that's true for men as well.
But with these medications in place,
hormonal birth control,
women are reaching a lower peak bone density.
So they're potentially gonna have a higher risk
of osteoporosis decades later,
which a lot of young women don't maybe care about that much.
A lot of the time when I'm speaking with my patients
and my followers,
they're more concerned about some of the mood side effects
and some of the side effects around metabolic health
and sports performance, things like that,
that are also affected by hormonal birth control.
Who would you say, Lara,
that is there a story that pertains to your why
that you'd like to share today?
Yeah, I think for me, it was, I mean,
early on in my practice, so coming at this,
I started off in small town in Canada, actually,
just in a little tiny town of about 4,000 people
treating just people with all sorts of different conditions.
I didn't realize at first
and I was gonna be working so much with women,
but then of course it's women who were coming to me,
that was back in the 90s,
back when there was a lot more surgery
and higher dose birth control
and they were really wanting other answers.
And so I think my story was learning on the ground,
as you do in a lot of professions, I think.
I had some tools from my training as a naturopathic doctor,
but then I just got to see early on
that some simple interventions work for periods,
work for women.
And I was very gratified, I'm still very grateful
to all the patients over the decades
that came, put their trust in me
and were willing to do things a little bit differently.
There's one of my favorite Amazon reviews
on my first book, Period of Perimanual,
that I still remember and kind of hold there is,
she said, I had no idea that what you eat
can affect your period.
And I thought, that's it,
that's what I'm trying to communicate to women everywhere,
that menstruation and to a large extent,
female hormones and metabolic hormones
and thyroid hormone health,
all of that is an extension of general health.
It's not in a separate category.
I think for too long, before this,
women's hormones and menstruation
had kind of been put in the too hard box
and just thought, well, we'll just,
that's really kind of an annoying part of female physiology,
we'll just switch that,
shut that all down with hormonal birth control,
with contraceptive medication.
And instead we can work with the body
and change the expression of that entire aspect
of women's health.
And it's a reframing,
it's quite fundamentally a paradigm shift
in how we view women's biology and what is possible.
Yeah, you're absolutely right because it is ludicrous to me
when, like, if you would take the same example
and put it in men's microbiology,
that would obviously make sense
because how would you go to the gym,
workout, do something, you know what I mean?
You're just not gonna have the chemicals
bodily necessary to do.
And that absolutely makes sense.
And it's been going on for a while.
Like it's, and in America,
like I don't even think that most women
are probably not even aware,
like they could do something differently
if that's the same cause,
they just go on their life
with side effects living throughout
and they have no idea this is all related.
Yeah, it's changing.
There's a bit of a revolution right now around this.
There's more growing awareness.
And actually, yeah, the first chapter of my book,
Periodic Permanently is called Period Revolution,
just realizing, you know, women thinking,
yeah, we can actually do this.
We can have our own menstrual cycles.
We can make our own hormones.
I mean, I guess one of my other takeaways,
and I know this from decades of speaking with women,
is to sort of challenge the narrative
that the bleeds, the kind of monthly bleeds
on the combined oral contraceptive,
just to point out that those are not menstrual cycles.
Those are just induced withdrawal bleeds.
There's actually no medical reason
to bleed monthly on the pill
because the entire hormonal system is shut down
and that's just sort of a, it's mimicking a cycle.
But when women's hormones are working properly,
which is very possible for most women
to get back to that place,
then a menstrual cycle is monthly
because that's how long it takes to ovulate,
to make both hormones, for the ovaries to do their thing.
Men are, this is again my reframing,
if you normalize female physiology,
hormonal physiology is monthly.
It's like males are, men are kind of quirky
and that they make testosterone every day,
which is through my lens,
just a different way of doing things.
So yeah, my work has been a celebration
of female physiology of the body
and just I hope communicating to women
that women's health is not as mysterious or complicated
as we've been led to believe.
There's a logic to it and it will respond
to lifestyle changes in many cases,
to diet changes in many cases.
Thank you for being here today.
I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live.
I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions
as these episodes continue to move forward.
This is gonna get more and more fun.
We'll have more and more engagement as well.
We'll invite people to participate in the show
and thank you for giving us your time and attention.
Have an excellent time building out your vision
and becoming a Vision Pro yourself.