NutraWomen Wednesday: Linda Alvarez, MD, Co-founder, Levelle Nutrition

11-Sep-2024 - Last updated on 11-Sep-2024 at 14:09 GMT

With women’s needs often overlooked, Linda Alvarez, MD, didn’t found Levelle Nutrition because she wanted to sell products, rather, she and her co-founder saw a problem and were driven to solve it.

Levelle Nutrition, a 2023 Start-Up Star, leverages Alvarez’s unique background that combines Western and Ayurvedic medicine—something she realized was necessary while in school.

"When I was in medical school, it was so clear to me that the cause of many of the diseases that we're dealing with is poor nutrition," she said. "Like we would spend over a year on pathology, pathophysiology… and pharmacology was also like a year. And then we had like, I don't know, less than a week elective on nutrition? I think there's a disconnect.”

So when it was time to start her clinical years, Alvarez took a year off to study Eastern medicine, focusing on Ayurveda.

"It had such an integral background that included diagnoses as well as physical diagnosis techniques and medicinal plants, and you use that as a launch pad to really understand medicinal plants even further," she said. "That is something that I continue to use and really amplify through my sports nutrition background."

Years later, Alvarez said other medical students also started taking a year sabbatical to study nutrition.

"My heart grew," she said. “And you're seeing it so much more talked about now about what's going into our foods and really how we are better utilizing nutrition as an equal part of medicine, so it's an exciting time.”

Alvarez went on to get her MBA from Cornell, where she and her future co-founder interviewed hundreds of female athletes.

"Every single one of them had an issue around nutrition," Alvarez said. "We're talking about nausea, vomiting, headache, diarrhea, muscle cramps, and I wouldn't want to deal with that watching a movie marathon on the couch, let alone running a 26-mile marathon. Women were just accustomed to suffering through it, and I think what was most upsetting was that every single woman felt as though it was her body that was the problem rather than products on the market."

This fall, Levelle Nutrition will launch a new plant-powered protein powder set designed to sync with the menstrual cycle that uses Helaina’s breakthrough ingredient, effera, the first human lactoferrin equivalent ingredient available on the market.

“So it really opens up these active nutrition protein powders for a larger audience that are looking for plant-powered proteins, and I'm so excited for it to come to market,” Alvarez said.