When Roma Van der Walt speaks about women’s bodies and physiology, she comes from a place of experience. The former professional athlete and founder and CEO of Vitelle believes women need a unique, multi-modal, data-driven approach with context to tailor longevity interventions for female bodies.
“We can adopt the logic from sports science and the way teams apply it to their female athletes to inspire how we create better interventions for all women,” she says. “When we model adaptation, we create predictable health.”
You can hear more from Van der Walt’s talk during “The Great Healthcare Correction: Women’s Health” session at DOC 2025 in our video below or read our lightly edited conversation.
TRANSCRIPT
Roma Van der Walt
Hello, everybody. I’m really excited to be here. I’m also German, so that may not always come across as intended. We had an exceptional women’s health panel yesterday and then listened to Susan [Monarez], obviously. I think two things really stood out to me, which was that the doctor patient relationship could shift to where the patient and technology can take care of 90% of their health. And then the patient, meeting the provider takes up the 10% to really get that human interaction. The second thing that stood out in the Women’s Health panel yesterday was the fact that we have no data. That’s my jam. I love data. So let’s talk about data.
Female bodies, as you may all know, have to adapt every single day. They have to adapt to hormones, to stress, like being up on stage to training load and to life. But despite the fact that that’s our adaptation and the core of our resilience, that is vastly ignored by the data systems that we’re currently working with. So Brit has already introduced me. I’m Roma Van der Walt, I’m an exercise physiologist.
I’m a former professional athlete, and I am also the founder and CEO of Vitelle, where our goal is really to create the data infrastructure to finally decode how female bodies adapt. So in exercise physiology, there’s a term called super compensation that describes the period after a stressor when the body not only recovers, but it actually rebounds to a higher level of function. That’s really important. We’re not just playing ping pong. You’re okay. You’re not okay. But then, as you may have guessed, in women it’s not that straightforward, predominantly because of two hormones called estrogen and progesterone. When our estrogen is high might look like muscle glycogen storage is improved. Mitochondrial efficiency is improved in the cells, and even things like muscle protein synthesis. For body composition when estrogen and progesterone are low, on the other hand, our parasympathetic nervous system doesn’t recover as well. We’re more reliant on carbohydrates, and we’re generally less resilient to stress. But what happens and what you can see here is that if we model a standard and 72 hour recovery window, which is modeled on male data, we could significant the overall undershoot the optimal adaptation window for women.
That’s just one missed opportunity of what we’re not doing to create optimal well-being for female bodies. Because the female body, as we all know, like, well, everybody female in the room knows has to recalibrate itself every single month. And that includes our metabolism, temperature. It’s things like our brain chemistry, and there’s a whole data layer that we’re not currently looking at yet, but what we measure, we can manage or as both scientists like to say, test. Don’t guess. If we start collecting data and we want to create equitable health intelligence, we really have to make sure it’s multi dimensional data. It has to take into consideration hormones, physiology and most importantly context. So that these models that we’re working on, like Claudius and Claude and Claudia, can learn from female adaptation instead of flattening it.
The most popular example that we have I athletes. I was a professional athlete. I know how hard that adaptation is, and they are under pressure adapting every single day. But the one thing that they have that we’re trying to establish in this room they have multimodal teams. So their support is physiological, it is clinical and it is practical. When the team behind the team dials in their health, their recovery and their biology, that’s when the injury risk goes down, their readiness stabilizes and their performance peaks.
When we observe these athletes on the field, we should really think about how we can be creative in designing health interventions for everybody else off the field. When, we look at the market and I won’t harp on it, but there’s an almost $800 billion preventive care market, and 60 to 70% of that is driven by women. But again, as we all know, despite that fact, interventions for women are reactive. They are siloed, and they’re still one size fits all. We can apply the logic from sports science and the way they apply it to their female athletes to try and think about how we can create better interventions, for women and in general. When we model adaptation, we create predictable health. The female body is nuanced. We know that it’s annoying. It’s part of why we weren’t part of clinical trials for so long. But it’s actually also a blueprint. It’s a blueprint for cyclical stress exposure, for variable recovery and for distributed load management.
In my opinion, the next health revolution is and has to be female. Because if we get it right and we cross between siloed metrics, that’s how we optimize health span and lifespan for females. Then when we scale that, we transform health systems, because these women are at the center of our communities and caring for everybody else. After I said all this and it’s obviously very female-centric, what I’m not trying to say, if you take anything away, that the future of health is gendered, I really think that the future of health is adaptive. Thank you. Thank you very much.