Dr. Marina Straszak-Suri, an Ottawa-based OBGYN who has spent 35 years helping women and couples navigate conception and reproductive health issues, is on a mission to create awareness about improving fertility and overall vitality through her latest book, Optimize Your Fertility Naturally: A Holistic Guide to Achieving a Healthy Pregnancy.
When Dr. Marina Straszak-Suri’s daughter graduated from medical school three years ago, she had an unusual request for her 31st birthday. She asked her mom if she would help pay to freeze her eggs. This was just before she began a demanding three-year residency program at the fifth-largest trauma centre in the U.S., which meant she would have to delay pregnancy. “My first instinct was to immediately agree. However, on second thought, I realised that freezing stressed and tired eggs would negatively impact egg quality, thus decreasing the chances of a successful pregnancy for her,” reveals Dr. Marina Straszak-Suri, MD, FRCSC, an Ottawa-based obstetrician-gynaecologist with more than 35 years of clinical experience in women’s health and fertility. This sparked Dr. Marina’s interest in researching how lifestyle impacts fertility, because many young people like her daughter are deferring pregnancy for a variety of reasons.
The research resulted in a book, Optimize Your Fertility Naturally: A Holistic Guide to Achieving a Healthy Pregnancy, a data-driven, integrative guide that integrates conventional reproductive medicine with emerging research and natural lifestyle remedies for women and men to optimize their fertility, well before they are ready to start a family.
Emphasizing that reproductive health is a shared dynamic and not a woman’s alone, the book reframes fertility as a vital sign of overall health, instead of a narrow reproductive problem or a race against the biological clock. The book examines how metabolic balance, hormones, inflammation, nutrition, sleep, stress, environmental exposures, and lifestyle choices shape reproductive function across the lifespan. Importantly, the book also distinguishes what can be optimized naturally, minimizing the need for fertility treatments or assisted reproduction, helping readers make informed decisions that increase their chances of a healthy pregnancy.
“Over the course of writing the book, it was shocking to discover how little people knew about their own reproductive health. This book is meant to empower individuals and couples with the knowledge to care for their health more holistically, and understand fertility as part of lifelong wellbeing rather than a last-minute crisis. Countering myths pertaining to fertility, the book also seeks to offer hope, speaking directly to women navigating delayed motherhood, pregnancy loss, recurrent miscarriage, IVF, egg freezing, child-free outcomes, and the emotional weight of fertility expectations,” says Dr. Marina.
Given the current global fertility crisis, Dr. Marina believes family doctors, too, could benefit from reading her book and can recommend it to their patients. “Conventionally trained doctors are usually trained to diagnose a condition and suggest treatment. They simply don’t have the time to suggest preventive techniques such as lifestyle changes that have such a major impact on reproductive health and can possibly prevent the need for expensive fertility treatments later, such as IVF, which are not always successful. This is why I wrote the book,” she explains.
Passionate about education, Dr. Marina was an Assistant Professor, Faculty of Medicine at the University of Ottawa for 30 years. She has trained numerous medical students, residents, and healthcare professionals in obstetrics, gynaecology, and ultrasound, balancing complex medical science with actionable, evidence-based lifestyle guidance. As the co-owner of Sound Diagnosis Ultrasound Clinic, which closed last month after 35 years, she empowered individuals and couples with clear, practical insights rooted in the latest reproductive research; emphasizing education, prevention, and personalised decision-making to help them naturally optimize their fertility and overall well-being.
As the co-owner of Centrepointe Medical Consultants, which she founded with her husband, Dr. Permjit Suri, in 1993, Dr. Marina offers a unique holistic and functional approach to patient care, blending naturopathic concepts with conventional medicine, with a focus on longevity and restorative medicine. Some of her innovative treatments include FemiWave, a shockwave therapy aimed at treating female sexual dysfunction, laser vaginal treatment for vaginal atrophy, Platelet-Rich Plasma (PRP) – a regenerative therapy for enhancing women’s sexual health and Bioidentical Hormone therapy for treating menopausal conditions. “I also use Low Dose Naltrexone (LDN), which, while being very useful in treating autoimmune diseases and long COVID, has also recently been found to be effective in treating polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), endometriosis and fertility issues,” remarks Dr. Marina.
A strong advocate of ‘biohacking fertility’ — adopting natural lifestyle changes or combining conventional and alternative medicine treatments to improve fertility, Dr. Marina is also an ardent proponent of nutrigenomics. By revealing genetic sequences that alter an individual’s enzymes and metabolism, nutrigenomics can serve as a personalised nutritional guide to a healthier lifestyle and improved reproductive health.
Till recently, Dr. Marina offered a three-month online course on optimizing fertility, with topics related to decoding male and female physiology; the connection between nutrition, exercise, sleep, environment, stress management and fertility; the specifics of nutrigenomic testing, genetics and genomics; new fertility and sexual health treatments, as well as various Ayurvedic and traditional Chinese medicinal treatments and how they can be effectively combined with conventional medicine. Most of these topics have now been integrated into her book, which she believes can reach more people than the course did.
In her role as an OB-GYN, author, fertility strategist and longevity enthusiast, Dr. Marina considers it her mission and responsibility to advocate for early fertility awareness, sexual health and associated issues pertaining to women’s health and reproduction. She does this through international speaking engagements, regular podcasts and short videos, a weekly blog on her website, and now, through her book.
“Sex education is supremely important. I think we’re not doing a good job in high schools, because whatever kids are being taught there, they don’t remember. Most women don’t really know much about their ovulation cycle, like when in their cycle they are most fertile. Moreover, several health issues that young women face, such as irregular periods, PCOS or endometriosis, are an underlying cause of fertility trouble, which could have been prevented if diagnosed and treated earlier. There’s also such a dearth of practitioners now that I think people have to take charge of their own health, without relying too much on the medical system,” avers Dr. Marina.
One of the major misconceptions that Dr. Marina aims to debunk is that ‘it’s always the woman to blame’ for any pregnancy-related issue. She emphasizes that most of the time, infertility or miscarriages are in fact related to sperm problems, so addressing men’s health as equally important to a pregnancy is imperative.
Discussing the broader fertility trends and the changes she has observed over the course of her three decades of practice in Ottawa, Dr. Marina says that while for men, sperm counts have decreased by over 50 percent in two generations, more women are experiencing PCOS and endometriosis, causing irregular periods and problems conceiving. Insulin resistance and obesity have also sharply increased for both men and women over the years, owing to more sedentary lifestyles, stress, insufficient exercise, higher consumption of fast food and processed foods, chemicals from plastics, as well as environmental toxins.
“The public health implications of these changing fertility patterns are significant because in 30-40 years, we may be looking at an absence of the younger workforce that pays taxes and keeps our society running, only to be replaced by an ageing population with not enough money to care for them,” states Dr. Marina. The solution is to talk to youth about the importance of self-care and remind them that fertility should never be taken for granted. “We also need to talk to couples about protecting their fertility well before pregnancy by implementing simple lifestyle changes, as well as about the dangers of delaying pregnancy, which makes it harder to conceive later,” she adds.
Even as a teenager, Dr. Marina knew she wanted to become a doctor. Having studied and worked in Ottawa, Montreal and Toronto, at prestigious institutions such as the University of Ottawa and Montreal Neurological Institute-Hospital, her later interest in obstetrics and gynaecology was fueled by her joy of delivering babies and helping fellow women overcome health challenges. As an undergrad, she studied Ayurvedic medicine in Sri Lanka and later, as a volunteer in Haiti and East Africa, she taught obstetric and surgical skills to local clinicians.
Last year, Dr. Marina won the Most Visionary Women’s Health And Fertility Specialist Award (Canada) and the Holistic Patient Education Excellence Award (Canada) at the Women’s Health Awards 2025.
Dr. Marina continues to be motivated by the impact she is making on people’s lives. “As part of my research for this book, I spoke to a number of people to gain some insights. One of them was my husband’s 37-year-old great niece, Puneet Birgi. She was contemplating pregnancy and had been advised to freeze her eggs. After reading the first draft of my book, she and her husband began implementing my recommendations. Within a few months, they both felt so much better physically, and she decided to go ahead with pregnancy instead of freezing her eggs, as per my advice. She got pregnant in her first cycle itself, and it was so rewarding to hear how much the book had helped her with her pregnancy.”
Going forward, Dr. Marina is focused on promoting her book over the next few months, with a book launch in Ottawa on June 25, following the book’s official release on Amazon on June 20.
As a parting note, she leaves us with this thought: “The future of women’s health depends on empowering women with knowledge about their bodies. Through education and practical lifestyle guidance, people can make informed decisions earlier, improving outcomes for families. I remain deeply committed to this mission.”
Optimize Your Fertility Naturally is available for pre-launch purchase on Amazon and can be ordered via Dr. Marina’s website.
Download Dr. Marina’s free report, “Seven Tips to Optimize Your Chance of a Healthy Pregnancy” here and connect with her on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram.
Photos by Tanya Blake
