YouTuber of Nutrition Education

Owner, Producer, Creative Director and Nutrition Science Writer at Nourishable YouTube channel  
Adjunct instructor at Tufts University

Early Influences

Lara Hyde’s interest in nutrition began in Calgary Alberta where she grew up enjoying activities like skiing, hiking, and dance.  She knew how important it was to “nourish her instrument” and that dance could cause body image issues. She also has a severe peanut allergy which gave her an intense focus on food. These two experiences were the framework for a healthy relationship with food. She didn’t want food to become an obsession. Then through her college years, she had many experiences that refined her focus on the science of nutrition as a career.

College Years

She entered McGill University with the plan to study medicine. However, in the summer preceding her senior year of college, she had a job working in an emergency room and saw people coming in with preventable conditions. That shifted her focus to the prevention side of healthcare.  In her last summer at McGill, she worked in a nutrition lab feeding Omega 3 and 6 fatty acids to guinea pigs to measure the impact on bone development. She enjoyed her this taste of scientific research in a lab. Then, as a senior in college, she took a course in bone physiology and dove deeply into reading research related to nutrition and genes like how vitamin D enters the nuclei of genes and turns them on. For Lara, this was an aha moment. She was fascinated by the impact of lifestyle, food, and exercise at the molecular level of cells. She graduated with a major in physiology and minor in the social study of medicine.

Research and Advanced Degrees

Lara left McGill and Canada and headed south to Tufts University to pursue a master’s degree in biochemical and molecular nutrition. Tufts was a great fit because it has strong nutrition research and public policy programs. After her first year, she switched into the doctoral program and participated in cutting edge research. She loved that she could rotate through several different labs to identify a focus for her doctoral work.  Her research examined how aging changed the epigenetic patterns in the liver.  She was excited by epigenetics because it demonstrates how nurture influences nature. “It is fascinating to see that diet can modify genes by turning them on and off. It is the mechanism for how our environment is influencing our DNA and nutrition provides a big exposure,” she clarified. This was also an opportunity to experience life as a cancer researcher.

However, as Lara got deeper into the study of epigenetics (Epigenetics is the study of how your behaviors and environment can cause changes that affect the way your genes work. CDC.gov), she realized that a career in epigenetics meant spending a lot of time programming and that didn’t match her personality because it was isolating and did not fulfill her like she thought her career should.

Her experience doing a post-doc at Tufts further refined her interests and career direction.  They performed fascinating research on fibroblasts from diabetic foot ulcers to see how glucose changed epigenetic patterns in skin cells and impaired wound healing. Simultaneously, she had the chance to develop and teach a course called Science and the Human Experience which looked at the humanities side of science and she loved fostering curiosity and inspiring students to think deeply.

After her post doc, Lara ran a lab and taught at Dartmouth College and taught courses at a community college in New Hampshire. “These 2 environments forced me to make my message accessible to people from different backgrounds and life circumstances, which really stretched me,” she explained. While she loved working at Dartmouth, the daily 3 hours in a car wasn’t consistent with the messages about health that she was promoting. Another a-ha moment came when her community college students told her of the changes they had made in their diets as a result of her course. “That experience pushed me toward starting my YouTube channel because I wanted to influence more people.”

YouTube Entrepreneurship

She combined her love of research, performance and teaching into a successful and growing business called Nourishable. While she never imagined a career as a YouTuber, she loves that she can produce informational videos that reach thousands of consumers. “There isn’t an access barrier due to cost, location or time for people,” she shared.

Though it was a steep learning curve, in the public eye, she and her husband are collaborating to produce the videos. Nourishable is a synergy of their skills. Lara’s husband contributes his audio engineering lighting, camera angles, and filming skills. Lara draws on her dance and performance experience to make her videos entertaining and engaging, and her research skills to write evidence-based content.  Together they produce professional, entertaining, and informative videos on important consumer topics such as fad diets, daily intakes, allergies, and the microbiome. “The product I’m selling is trust. I am very transparent about my references. I am clear about what is opinion versus where the field stands,” she said.

During this time, Lara considered including training to be a registered dietitian but wasn’t sure whether she’d be living in Canada or the US.  She put down roots in New Hampshire, after marrying her American boyfriend, but by then, she was already building Nourishable and wanted to focus her development in communications and digital media creation.

Future Plans

Lara plans to grow Nourishable into a larger company with a team to provide alternative perspectives. She has been building her revenue avenues such as affiliate marketing and sponsored videos and is now able to hire people. Her priority is to build and maintain trust with the Nourishable audience not just be an influencer on Social Media platforms. “I will always be driven by science. Even if it hurts me in the short run. It is most important to be true to the science,” she said. Eventually, she would like Nourishable to be a non-profit and create campaigns and challenges that impact public health.

Advice for Others

• If considering a career as a YouTuber, “just get started. You get better with time and develop a thick skin against unkind people who don’t like what you say.”
• The ability to learn quickly is critical because the field is a growing, frontier science. While the public may be frustrated with nutrition information because it changes all the time, Lara sees it as an iterative process of building on a foundation of progress.
• Networking is incredibly important.
• Nourish your other interests. Lara’s combination of dance and nutrition has been an excellent pairing for her career. But also remember that “nutrition is a lifestyle. You want to be a whole person”
• In terms of whether to train to be an RD, I would recommend exploring your personality and identifying what environments invigorate you. For me, I like to delve into many disciplines and create lasting content, so producing videos is a good fit.”