NutraCast: Qina’s Mariette Abrahams on why personalized nutrition is the future

25-Feb-2022 - Last updated on 03-Nov-2022 at 15:25 GMT

The entrepreneur lays out how manufacturers and ingredient companies are falling short on addressing personalized nutrition and how more companies can take a more personalized approach.

The global personalized nutrition market size is projected to double over the next few years, going from $8.2 billion in 2020 to $16.4 billion by 2025, according to a Markets and Markets report.

In January, The National Institutes of Health announced that it has committed $170 million over the next five years to fund a study into how genetics and other factors can inform personalized nutrition recommendations.

One company that has its pulse on personalized nutrition is Qina, a strategic advisory and innovation company that aims to provide market insights and domain expertise to create personalized nutrition solutions.

“I think what excites me the most is this opportunity is using AI and machine learning in terms of how we help people live healthier lives because helping to change people's behavior is incredibly difficult. So you need to really understand what makes them make certain decisions. What makes them tick. And so you need to have a lot of different data points to be able to help someone to get the right message so that message and the information that you want to relay really speaks to them in their own language and helps them to drive them to action and drives them to want to make those behavior changes,” explained Mariette Abrahams, PhD, founder and CEO of Qina.

“We are learning more about the power of food, what is in food and food is data. And therefore, how does that help to improve your immune system and help improve your health and overall longevity? And so food is not just about calories, food is more than that– food is more in terms of how it can drive better health as well. And so those scientific advances in nutrition were always seen as more of a soft science, but now, it's definitely taken center stage as a hard science that really can impact health outcomes,” she added.

To hear more on how the industry landscape evolved over the years, what scientific advances are driving new innovations and where manufacturers and ingredient companies are falling short on addressing personalized nutrition, listen to the NutraCast.

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