In this preview of the upcoming The Outlook on Women's Wellness, Ayla Barmmer, MS, RD, LDN, Founder and CEO of FullWell, discusses new models of ovary health and new perspectives on women's health support.
As a preview of our upcoming The Outlook on Women’s Wellness, Nutritional Outlook interviewed Ayla Barmmer, MS, RD, LDN, Founder and CEO of FullWell, who will be presenting Reframing Ovarian Health for Lifelong Vitality at the event.
In this interview, Barmmer discusses how the ovary functions as a longevity organ and the role of the gut-ovary axis. She also shares her views on the latest opportunities in the women’s health category as the audience expands and interest increases.
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A transcript of this conversation can be found below.
Nutritional Outlook: Could you tell us a little about your professional background?
Ayla Barmmer: Sure. So my background is a little unconventional, I think, for the industry, in that I have spent most of my career as a practitioner. So my training is as a registered dietitian. I also am a functional medicine practitioner trained in integrative therapies and herbalism.
Learn more about The Outlook on Women's Wellness, taking place June 4, 2026, in East Windsor, New Jersey. The event will bring together leading nutraceutical scientists, formulators, brand strategists, and market experts for a full day of education examining the most in-demand benefits and ingredients in women's health.
And, yeah, most of my career has been spent building a multi clinician private practice where I really specialized in reproductive health and infertility and worked with, individuals globally. FullWell came to be out of a need that I saw in my practice, which was for the exact kind of formulation and quality control for a prenatal multivitamin that I was really not finding and wanted to see, you know, in the market and for, for my practice clients. And so that is how I started on this journey, which, I like to say that I rather naively, rather naively was like, I can just do this myself. And of course, as I think all the attendees at this conference will know it is, it's a challenge to formulate a quality supplement and ultimately manufacture it to your specifications and quality standards.
Nutritional Outlook: You'll be discussing reframing ovarian health for lifelong vitality. What are some of the key takeaways or lessons you want attendees to get from your presentation?
Barmmer: Yes, I'm so excited for this topic. By the end of the talk, attendees are going to have a completely new mental model for the ovary, one that really changes how you think about formulation for women across their entire lifespan. And I want to start with something really counterintuitive, just sharing here ahead of time that, you know, the ovary is not just a reproductive organ, it's a longevity organ. It ages before every other system in the body.
And when it declines, it takes with it bone density, cardiovascular health, and cognitive function. We've spent decades really solving the wrong problems. So the idea that I want every attendee to carry out of that room is that the gut talks to the ovary directly, continuously through estrogen metabolism, immune signaling, and short chain fatty acids that regulate the follicular microenvironment, which is a really interesting space. And research published just this year, which is exciting, shows that the microbiome transplants, that microbiome transplants in mice restored ovarian tissue to a younger inflammatory profile.
And really, there's no product on the market that's built around that connection yet. This is really a white space. So I'm going to leave the room with a question for people to sit with. And that will be, you know, if the gut ovary axis is real and the ingredients to address it already exist for the most part, you know, what are we really waiting for in that regard?
Nutritional Outlook: What excites you about the women's health category?
Barmmer: Yes. What excites me most about the women's health category is where the genuine opportunity sits right now. And it's, it's not in reformulating what already exists. It's in building something that this category has really never seen.
You know, here, here's something that I think surprises most people when I share this. It's that the science has really outpaced the products by years. And we have mechanistic frameworks for ovarian aging that are as rigorous as anything in the cardiovascular or even metabolic health space. And we have ingredients with real clinical data behind them.
And honestly, the shelf looks the same as it did kind of a decade ago for the most part in that way. But what really excites me is that the audience just got a lot bigger. This is not a fertility story anymore. You know, a forty five year old focus on longevity has the exact same biological stake in protecting ovarian function as a thirty two year old trying to conceive.
So same mechanisms, same ingredients, but it's really a completely different consumer identity. So to wrap that up, you know, the opportunity that I see in front of the industry and for the industry is to be the first to tell a coherent biological story, you know, from the mitochondria to the microbiome that every woman at every stage of life can have, can really genuinely see themselves in. And that doesn't come along very often, that opportunity.
