NutraWomen Wednesday: Mariëtte Abrahams, CEO and founder of Qina

05-Jul-2023 - Last updated on 05-Jul-2023 at 15:23 GMT

The personalized nutrition guru’s work lies at the intersection of nutrition, technology and society.

Mariëtte Abrahams has worked in the clinical and medical nutrition industry for over 20 years. She used her expertise in nutrition, business and research to create a personalized nutrition platform, Qina. The platform is designed to provide reliable market data, actionable insights and expert-led analysis to meet the needs of manufacturers, ingredient suppliers and subject matter experts.

“I see a lot of women, especially on the tech side, taking the lead in terms of creating startups– I think that is fantastic. I see this especially in terms of consumer health, so developing platforms that really address the complexity of healthcare, looking at women whether they want coaching, whether there's testing, whether there's a specific specialist that needs to come about. So they’re bringing all these different services and specializations into one platform and that I think is really key, because most of the time because women make so many of the health decisions as well, most of the time women might have questions about the child or maybe a partner, or the parents that she's looking after. And so I see more and more women looking at this health holistically and looking at it preventatively and I think those are some of the trends that we definitely see,” she said.

Abrahams added that she’s also seeing women take a central role in highlighting social risks and social impacts of AI, such as facial recognition and recommendations from machine learning

“That's really something that I see coming to the fore. They’re writing papers, they are doing publications, they are online doing interviews, they're on TV, and I think that is so good to see because traditionally, (traditionally still) women really have a central role not only to play in their own homes but also within the community,” said Abrahams. We at Qina are also very passionate about the ethics of AI and I think we need to take a stronger position and raise our voices even louder to make sure that it gets heard.”