Lara Briden - The Period Revolutionary

19/11/2025

Just like the to***co industry, ultra-processed food companies use powerful lobbying, marketing, and sponsored science to drive consumption. In 2024, the biggest companies spent more on advertising than the WHO’s entire operating budget! 😢

It’s overwhelming, and honestly heartbreaking, because the health toll is huge, especially for younger generations.

Check out the Conversation article, plus my metabolism book, where I share simple, practical ways to “shelter” from the modern food environment.

Links:
https://theconversation.com/the-ultra-processed-foods-problem-is-driven-by-commercial-interests-not-individual-weakness-heres-how-to-fix-it-269401

https://www.larabriden.com/metabolism-book/

Without policy action and a coordinated global response, ultra-processed foods will continue to rise in human diets, harming health, economies. It’s time to act.

18/11/2025

New research has linked choline deficiency to anxiety. It makes sense because choline is so important for the brain!

Links below.

Here are a few quick facts about this key nutrient:

💜 Choline is the precursor to acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter that’s calming, supports memory, and even helps to regulate appetite, gut motility, and metabolism.

💜 Your body can make a little choline, but not much. Most of it needs to come from food.

💜 Choline production depends on estrogen, which has researchers wondering if some of the brain benefits of estrogen therapy come from its support of choline metabolism. (You can also just take choline.)

💜 Scientists are pretty worried about how little choline most people eat.

💜 Choline is one of the five “missing metabolic nutrients” I highlight in my metabolism book.



Article: https://medicaldialogues.in/psychiatry/news/low-choline-levels-in-the-brain-associated-with-anxiety-disorders-suggests-study-158865
My metabolism book: https://www.larabriden.com/metabolism-book/

14/11/2025

How did we land on a narrative that women are "broken" at menopause? In reality, women have always outlived men. In both lifespan and healthspan.

A major reason is our stronger, more youthful immune system, powered by having two X chromosomes. Estrogen helps too, but our immune advantage continues long past menopause, so it’s clearly not just about estrogen.

For the science, check out the New Scientist article (source of the quote), plus a paper about how human females evolved to live decades after menopause in good health. Links below.

And for context on the hormonal side of things: I generally support menopausal hormone therapy. But I’d argue that the most powerful long-term benefits of estrogen and progesterone come from our younger years — the decades when we make those hormones through natural ovulatory menstrual cycles (and pregnancies, if we have them).

Which raises an important question: What happens when young women spend years in a low-hormone (essentially menopausal) state because hormonal birth control switches off ovarian function? The truth is, we don’t yet know.

New Scientist article. If you find it's paywalled, email me at lara@larabriden.com for the full text. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2501447-women-have-supercharged-immune-systems-and-we-now-know-why/

Evolution article: https://anthro-age.pitt.edu/ojs/anthro-age/article/view/8

My perimenopause book: https://www.larabriden.com/hormone-repair-manual/

13/11/2025

You’ve probably noticed "a bit" of enthusiasm lately about the benefits of estrogen (estradiol) and progesterone for midlife women.

Of course, those very same hormones are beneficial for younger women, who are meant to make them with natural ovulatory cycles. Unfortunately, many young women spend decades in a low-hormone state because their ovulation has been switched off by hormonal birth control.

As always, there's a little nuance:

• Not all methods fully suppress estradiol, but most suppress progesterone (the only exception is the hormonal IUD because it can sometimes permit ovulation).

• Some methods add back synthetic estrogen (ethinylestradiol), which has some (but not all) of the benefits of ovarian estradiol.

• A very small number add back body-identical estradiol.

• No methods add back progesterone, which means young women’s brains miss out on the benefits of that hormone.

For more about progesterone and the brain — including Sarah Hill’s point that the pill may increase the craving for alcohol — check out our Instagram Live: https://www.instagram.com/p/DQfUz51E-qC/

10/11/2025

I'm collecting real women’s stories for my new book. Stories about coming off hormonal birth control, finding your natural cycle, and discovering what really works for your periods and hormones.

If you’ve had success with natural treatment, nutrition, or lifestyle changes (even alongside medical treatment), I’d love to hear from you. Your story could help other women feel less alone and more hopeful.

Here's the link to share yours. 💛 https://forms.gle/XSxCgFmgS279QX8W7

I’m interested in all kinds of stories, but especially:
• Being told the pill would “regulate” your cycle
• Periods improving after coming off wheat, cow’s dairy, or other food sensitivities
• Losing your period to a low-carb diet
• Being told you have PCOS based on an ultrasound, when it was actually hypothalamic amenorrhea
• Success with antihistamine approaches (medication or natural) for premenstrual or perimenopausal mood symptoms
• Discovering there was more to your endometriosis story than you thought, such as other possible explanations for pain like pelvic floor dysfunction, bladder pain syndrome, or pelvic venous disease

04/11/2025

Do you experience brain fog, rashes, or IBS-type symptoms after eggs, red meat, or supplements like N-acetyl cysteine?

For some people, that pattern can suggest sulfur sensitivity, when the body has a hard time processing sulfur-containing compounds (like the amino acids methionine and cysteine, or glucosinolates in cruciferous veggies).

Sulfur metabolism is also one of the pathways for estrogen clearance, so symptoms can include breast tenderness, heavy or clotty periods, and premenstrual headaches.

What can help?
• Temporarily reducing high-sulfur foods like eggs, garlic/onion, red meat

• Supporting sulfation pathways with molybdenum, vitamin B6, and glycine

• Improving gut health to reduce hydrogen sulfide–producing bacteria 

It’s not super common, but if you’ve tried the other approaches and are still struggling, it could be something to explore.

Please share your knowledge. 👇🏼

03/11/2025

Progesterone is calming for some but chaos for others. 
So I wrote a troubleshooting guide to help you figure out why. And what to do next.

And let me know: Did I get it right? What did I miss?

Progesterone side effects? Learn how to effectively use body-identical progesterone for sleep, mood, bleeding, and perimenopause symptoms.

01/11/2025

Thank you to everyone who responded to my informal HRT poll! Across the Instagram feed post and story, I counted 394 responses, providing a fascinating real-world snapshot of experiences.

📊 54% reported a positive experience with hormone therapy, including quite a few who were using progesterone-only, which is interesting. And, of course, many women also reported excellent results with estrogen.

But 46% reported a negative experience, still struggling or not finding it helpful. There are lots of possible reasons for that, including not yet having found the right type or dose. Maybe.

Or maybe some women simply do not feel good on hormone therapy or want to take it. And that’s okay. 💛

Through my lens as a clinician and evolutionary biologist, I'll say this:

Human females evolved to live decades after menopause in good health. And throughout history and across cultures, women consistently outlive men.

So, while hormone therapy can be hugely beneficial for women who want it or need it, it is NOT (in most cases) a requirement for long-term health. ✅

If you’re interested in the evolutionary biology angle, check out this paper: https://anthro-age.pitt.edu/ojs/anthro-age/article/view/8

And just a reminder that I’ve long been supportive of hormone therapy. Even after the WHI study in the 2000s, I continued to prescribe body-identical hormones (called bioidentical back then).

(These figures do not include the responses I received on Facebook. But at a glance, they showed a similar breakdown.)

31/10/2025

I want to talk about this stat.⁣

📌 It’s from a United Nations population projection. But by “menopause,” they mean all the decades past age 50. (Epidemiologists use the term menopause to mean the life phase that begins one year after the final period — what many call postmenopause.)⁣

Unfortunately, when this stat is shared, it’s often communicated in a way that implies that all those women (all 1 billion!) are actively experiencing perimenopausal symptoms.⁣
⁣
Nothing could be further from the truth! 😭
⁣
Most of those women are years past the transition, busy living their productive lives, and any perimenopausal symptoms (if they ever had them) are a distant memory.⁣
⁣
As Prof. Jerilynn Prior Centre for Menstrual Cycle and Ovulation Research says:
“Women need to know that the turbulent time of perimenopause ends in a kinder and calmer phase of life called menopause (aka postmenopause).”⁣

And sure, there are health considerations postmenopause, but that's a different conversation. See the "What comes after" chapter in my perimenopause book, Hormone Repair Manual.

30/10/2025

If you’ve tried hormone therapy (HRT), I’d love to hear how it’s been for you. Did it help? Did you run into challenges?

Vote A, B, C, or D below, and maybe share a little more in the comments. I’ll try to reply to as many as I can. 💛

For context: I’ve long been supportive of hormone therapy. Even after the WHI study in the 2000s, I continued to prescribe body-identical hormones because many of us in integrative medicine could already see they were safer than the old Premarin-progestin combinations. (Back then, bioidentical options were much harder to access!)

Still, some women simply don’t feel good on any type or dose of hormone therapy. And that’s important to talk about, too.

And if you’re younger than 35, please ignore all the perimenopause discourse. Instead, focus on having natural, ovulatory cycles because that’s how you make your own hormones!

29/10/2025

Progesterone is wild. 🤯
It doesn’t sit still, but pulses in response to LH, rising and falling dramatically every 90 minutes! That’s fascinating physiology… but also a cautionary tale about lab tests.

A single “low progesterone” result might simply mean the blood was taken during a progesterone trough, one of the natural dips between pulses. It doesn’t necessarily reflect the full picture of ovulation or the health of the luteal phase, and can be less helpful than temperature tracking.

And progesterone isn’t the only lab value that can mislead:

• Ferritin — can be falsely high with inflammation or even a tough workout
• TSH — can be falsely low with stress, fasting, or biotin supplements
• Urinary estrogen — can be falsely low due to timing, dilution, metabolism, or the sample sitting warm (bacterial enzymes break down estrogen metabolites)
• Fasting insulin — can be falsely low after heavy exercise, too-long fasting, or assay variability

Bottom line:
Labs are just one part of the picture. 📸 The bigger story will be told by signs, symptoms, and (in the case of progesterone) temperatures.

Links to:
- the paper that mentions the 8-fold progesterone variability: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4436586/
- my article "Your progesterone story is bigger than a lab test." https://www.larabriden.com/your-progesterone-story-is-bigger-than-a-lab-test/

27/10/2025

Insulin resistance doesn’t always mean high blood sugar. In fact, in the early decades, it’s more likely to cause low blood sugar or reactive hypoglycemia, that shaky, anxious, hungry feeling a few hours after eating.

That’s why blood sugar or HbA1C tests can miss insulin resistance. Instead, look at triglycerides and ALT, two simple markers you’ve probably already had tested.

Links to:
- my metabolism book:
https://www.larabriden.com/metabolism-book/

- my two podcast / YouTube episodes about low blood sugar. (Because insulin resistance is not the ONLY cause.)
https://www.larabriden.com/hypoglycemia-in-young-women-the-science-behind-hangry/

https://www.larabriden.com/decoding-hypoglycemia-is-it-insulin-resistance-or-dysautonomia/