Last Christmas, I met a customer at our London pop-up who clarified how I think about the future of HI Foods. She was completing her second round of IVF and held our postnatal nut butter in her hands, asking if it might help with her chances of falling pregnant.
I knew she wasn’t asking about nut butter.
She was asking about her body, about her future, about whether anyone in her overwhelming fertility journey actually understood that her physiological needs were suddenly so profoundly different than her baseline standard of health and care, a standard she’d been cultivating for decades. Standing in that noisy pop-up, I realized I couldn’t give her the answers she needed—not because our products wouldn’t help, but because the conversation she needed to have required space, time, care, and complex research analysis.
From our first period to our last, we navigate these wild seasons of womanhood, and yet I’ve never met a single person who made it through with ease, joy, and comprehensive information and guidance. It is, in a word, devastating.
That Christmas conversation revealed the true scope of what we’re addressing at HI.
Every day, we face:
Information Crisis
Conflicting information and misinformation, creating confusion and overwhelm amidst competing health and wellness advice.
Complexity Problem
Protocols so complicated they’re impossible to maintain, when simple, effective integration into daily life is needed.
Menstrual & Reproductive Health Blind Spots
Growing awareness of the connection between nutrition and hormonal health, but virtually no quality products designed for the critical windows between menarche and menopause.
The Accessibility Crisis
Quality reproductive health solutions that are often prohibitively expensive, creating a two-tier system where access depends on economic privilege rather than need. Given that reproductive rights are nonexistent to substandard in most parts of the world, preventative care and self-advocacy are more critical than ever.
Unsolved and perpetuated, these realities pass from season to the next, one generation to the next, one body to the next.
But the flip side of that coin is also true: the way we learn to care for our bodies, the knowledge we gain and develop over months and years, the joy of figuring out what actually, truly works, all of this also ripples forward, body to body, generation to generation. With nutritional adequacy, environmental quality, psychosocial support, and structural healthcare access, better health in a female body is a true possibility.
A world with redesigned healthcare systems, physical spaces, and data ecosystems centered on female biology and life cycles; it’s all possible. That’s the world we’re building at HI, starting with one powerful little pouch of nut butter.
The more mainstream interpretation of what we’re producing at HI might look like cycle synching, but the research we’re building on is more complex and profoundly impactful: exposome studies (environmental exposures that an individual encounters throughout life, and how these exposures impact biology and health) and epigenetic inheritance research demonstrate that 70-90% of health outcomes stem from modifiable factors during specific developmental windows, not genetic predisposition1. These critical windows represent periods of heightened biological plasticity when targeted nutritional interventions create exponential, often permanent effects. Unlike traditional nutrition approaches that treat symptoms, critical windows nutrition addresses root programming during the precise moments when biological systems establish their operational patterns2.
The menstrual cycle represents a monthly microcosm of these critical windows, with each phase creating distinct opportunities for targeted intervention. Cycle-syncing moves beyond generic nutrition timing to leverage the precise hormonal fluctuations that govern metabolism, inflammation, detoxification, and cellular repair.
The science underlying critical windows nutrition rests on three interconnected mechanisms:
Epigenetic programming demonstrates that environmental inputs, including specific nutrients, phytochemicals, and bioactive compounds, during critical developmental windows create heritable modifications to gene expression patterns that can persist across multiple generations, meaning nutritional interventions during key phases impact both individual health and influence offspring outcomes3.
Developmental plasticity research reveals that certain biological periods, including specific phases of the menstrual cycle, pregnancy, lactation, and perimenopause, exhibit dramatically heightened responsiveness to targeted nutritional interventions, with studies showing up to 10-fold greater impact when interventions are precisely timed to match periods of increased cellular receptivity and metabolic flexibility4.
Metabolic imprinting studies demonstrate that early nutritional exposures, whether during fetal development, early infancy, or critical hormonal transition periods, establish metabolic set-points and regulatory patterns that influence lifelong health trajectories, including insulin sensitivity, inflammatory responses, and reproductive function, suggesting that strategic nutrition during these windows can reprogram biological systems for optimal long-term outcomes5.
Given our understanding of critical developmental windows, we have an unprecedented opportunity to create targeted interventions across the complete spectrum of female reproductive health. From menarche to menopause, each characterized by unique hormonal profiles, metabolic demands, and intervention opportunities, we’re aligning our product development to deliver precisely-timed nutritional solutions that address root programming rather than symptom management, creating superior health outcomes across the entire reproductive lifespan.
I’ll be sharing more about our world of Hormonal Intelligence at HI Foods here: the research and evidence on nutrition and hormonal health, deep dives into our products, insights from the intersection of academia and business innovation, and conversations on health, in all of its forms: physical, mental, emotional, relational, generational, and of course, hormonal. If you prefer to listen, check out the audio recording at the top of post. Next up, a delicious interview with celebrity chef and cookbook author Rachel Khoo!
Maria Miracle is the founder of HI Foods. HI Foods makes high-quality, nutrient-dense food products that support hormonal balance and overall well-being across the 40+ year reproductive timeline. Learn more at www.hifoods.co.uk.
Argentieri, M.A., Amin, N., Nevado-Holgado, A.J. et al. Integrating the environmental and genetic architectures of aging and mortality. Nat Med 31, 1016–1025 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-024-03483-9.
Huhn, S., Escher, B.I., Krauss, M. et al. Unravelling the chemical exposome in cohort studies: routes explored and steps to become comprehensive. Environ Sci Eur 33, 17 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12302-020-00444-0.
Tyler M Moore, Elina Visoki, Stirling T Argabright, Grace E Didomenico, Ingrid Sotelo, Jeremy D Wortzel, Areebah Naeem, Ruben C Gur, Raquel E Gur, Varun Warrier, Sinan Guloksuz, Ran Barzilay. Modeling environment through a general exposome factor in two independent adolescent cohorts. Exposome, Volume 2, Issue 1, 2022, https://doi.org/10.1093/exposome/osac010.
Vrijheid M. The exposome: a new paradigm to study the impact of environment on health. Thorax. 2014 Sep 6. (9): 876-8. doi: 10.1136/thoraxjnl-2013-204949.
Evangelos Handakas, Oliver Robinson, Jessica E. Laine. The exposome approach to study children's health. Current Opinion in Environmental Science & Health. Volume 32, 2023, 100455, ISSN 2468-5844. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.coesh.2023.100455.
Such an important topic!
Love love love!! What a gift you’re giving the world