Our story so far...
Sorcha & Finn, the students/siblings behind the start-up Medjuica, tell us a bit about how it all began…
Finn: The concept of Medjuica was ignited by our love of food. We were lucky to have lived in France and Spain as children and to experience the priority of sitting down and enjoying a meal. We grew up eating healthy organic foods and felt we should share the benefits with everyone. We were also aware of healthy eating from a young age and learned from our mother about foods that can harm and foods that heal. Bookshelves in our home were overflowing with reference books on the science of eating healthily. Our Mum made organic green smoothies long before they became popular. As young adults, we became conscious of the everyday snacks available to us and soon realised the snacks promoted daily are ultra-processed junk, and not only are they bad for your body, but they also damage your mind too!
If you pour petrol into the tank of a diesel car, it won’t take long for the car to break down, yet people often fuel their bodies with handy, harmful snacks. My sister Sorcha and I decided to harness our knowledge, using the scientific studies from the bookshelves, to offer nutritious ambient snacks in calorie-controlled single-serving portions in one box, making it easy for people to eat the correct daily portion of healthy foods while on the go.
The box covers anything from 2 to 7 days, or you can buy the individual products in minimum quantities of 15. If you’re committed to health goals, having supplies readily available to grab and go will make reaching your goals easier. We’d also like to see Medjuica in vending machines in hospitals. Medics often eat junk food, especially on night duty, yet they’re expected to perform life-saving work, so we’d like to offer them a healthy snack option. Likewise, patients would benefit from strengthening their immunity with Medjuica snacks. Often, they are gifted chocolates as a ‘treat’, yet science has shown these sugary snacks affect our gut microbiome, which can impact immunity and recovery.
Sorcha:
Medjuica was born out of frustration at the dire choices we face when buying snacks. You go to a cinema or theatre, and what’s on offer are empty calories wrapped in fancy packaging. I find it a pain having to check the ingredients on every snack I purchase. The brilliant App called ‘YUKA’ really helps me make informed choices. I scanned a can of Coca-Cola using it, and it gave it a 0 out of 100; you’d consume 140 calories for ZERO nutritional gain. As the idea of Medjuica evolved, we curated a box containing exceptional ‘Trinity Health’ because it benefits the gut, the heart and the brain. We hope to bring out more options for other health benefits, and we also want to develop Medjuica’s own-brand organic nuts in single servings. I’ve just finished my degree in French and Business at university. Medjuica is a long-awaited hands-on enterprise for me to offer people tasty, alternative healthy snack choices.
Q: How did you decide on the contents for the Healthy Trinity box?
Finn: I started intense research on scientific evidence-based studies to find nutrient-rich foods that improved overall health because I wanted to strengthen my immune system. Following two years of consultation and reading, the answers were the same over and over again. Apart from the obvious fruit, vegetables, and legumes, the superfoods are distilled down to nuts, seeds, dark chocolate, olive oil, olives, and green tea.
Sorcha: Sourcing organic raw chocolate with no emulsifiers or refined sugar proved a serious challenge (our 94% cacao is minimally sweetened with dates). The therapeutic effect from Cacao requires just 20g, which is half a bar. Flavenols act as antioxidants, which fight free radicals, the baddies that cause inflammation and chronic disease.
There’s significant food fraud in supermarkets, which led us to source an organic EVOO supplier that produced the highest polyphenols of any cold-pressed oil, and it’s made from a mono-varietal olive. The mini 10ml bottles provide a powerful therapeutic effect, you’d have to ingest half a litre of other EVOO to match the polyphenols in our 10ml bottle. It’s very easy to overdo the calories in extra virgin olive oil; even our 10ml (2 teaspoons) has 177 calories. EVOO is one of the most important components of the Mediterranean diet. Likewise, sourcing a 30g packet of organic olives was not easy, but we persevered and eventually found a wonderful supplier in Greece
Q: What do you mean by ‘food as medicine’?
Finn: Firstly, we‘ve been told we can’t use that term! But it’s perfectly ok for a UPF company to make false health claims for products containing bad ingredients. To answer the question, we all know we would die without food or water. Equally, if we tried living on vitamin supplements alone, we’d die within weeks. On average, we ingest 2,000 calories a day; Mejuica offers the opportunity to ensure each daily mouthful matters and is nutritionally dense.
Kellogg’s Pringles have additives that make it impossible to ‘stop when you pop’ a 200g can. Hands up, whoever stopped after eating their recommended 30g serving, or 1/6th of a tin? There’s over 1,000 calories in each tin, or half your recommended daily calorie intake. It has zero nutritional value, save for some fibre and potassium. Pringles’ ingredients include Dehydrated Potatoes, Vegetable Oils (Sunflower, Palm, Corn), wheat Flour, Corn Flour, Rice Flour, Maltodextrin, Emulsifier (E471), Salt, and Colour (Annatto Norbixin). These additives make it impossible to stop eating them.
Other crisp companies, such as Walker, advertise their crisps as ‘perfect for snacking’. The crisps provide approximately 128 calories per pack. Ingredients include: Potatoes, Sunflower Oil, Rapeseed Oil, and Smoky Bacon Seasoning. Dried Milk Lactose, Salt, Sugar, Flavouring, Hydrolysed Soya Protein, Citric Acid, Malic Acid, Smoke Flavouring, Paprika Extract, Sulphite Ammonia Caramel, Dried Pork Shoulder. It lists o% for every vitamin and mineral, except sodium. We wrote to Walkers and asked them for the nutritional data for their crisps. They replied there was none.
Our 30g serving of the organic Kalamata & green olives has 59 calories per pack. The ingredients include organic mixed pitted olives (kalamata & green), salt, trace of organic vinegar, organic extra virgin olive oil and citric acid (which occurs naturally in citric fruit). Due to its high polyphenols and antioxidants, as well as containing monounsaturated fats and fibre, these olives can help lower bad LDL, raise good cholesterol and are heart-healthy. Vitamins include A, C, B, E, and K, and Minerals: iron, calcium, magnesium, phosphorus, and potassium.
Sorcha: The UPF snack industry – like its victims – is growing exponentially. Do you want to digest 130 calories which impedes health or 60 calories bursting with nutrients? Of course, organic olives are more expensive than a packet of crisps, but one is helping your health and the other is hindering it. What price are you prepared to pay to stay healthy? Half a million packets of Tayto crisps are sold in Ireland every day, and six billion packets of crisps are consumed annually in the UK; that figure is increasing year-on-year. The price for the consumption of ultra-processed food ultimately falls on the taxpayer, who bankrolls a health service that treats metabolic diseases which bad foods ultimately cause. Of course, we can’t be good ALL of the time. The 80%-20% in favour of good food is a good yeardstick.
Q: Why is everything organic?
Finn: We are passionate about using organic products. The weedkiller Roundup. whose active ingredient is Glyphosate, a known carcinogen, is permitted for use by farmers in the EU. We are ingesting cancer-causing chemicals from fruit and vegetables sprayed with this herbicide. Add to that, chemicals found in plastics or antibiotics in animal products and you get a cocktail of poisons. These have a cumulative effect on our bodies. In Europe, Glyphosate represents one-third of all herbicides used on crops. Even the humble non-organic lemon in supermarkets contains chemicals such as imazalil, pryipoxyfen, pryidaben and chlorpyrifos. Although the quote attributed to Einstein is unproven, the message resonates: “If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, man would only have four years of life left.” These chemicals are killing our bee population. Eurostat figures show that in 2022, Ireland had only a 2% share of organic land; in France, it is over 10%.
Sorcha: ‘Forever chemicals’ are something we should be very concerned about because they don’t break down. They’re in everyday household products and plastics. They cause immunotoxicity, high cholesterol, liver disease, kidney disease, infertility, fetal complications, colon and testicular cancer, and thyroid disease. Headlines in newspapers ask why bowel/colon and other cancers in people in their 20s, 30s, 40s, & 50s are on the increase. A deep dive is overdue into the rise in UPF and chemicals in foods in the supply chain and into contaminated water used by livestock, which is leeched into rivers and seas, so the fish is affected. It’s no surprise that microplastics have been found in heart and brain tissue. Forty different studies found the presence of toxic ‘forever chemicals’ in umbilical cord blood. Forever chemicals such as phthalate are in almost everything plastic, so buy products contained in glass. Every time you squeeze a plastic bottle, you are releasing these chemicals. They are in lipstick, nail varnish, perfume – there’s no escaping them. But knowledge is power. We, the consumers, can vote with its purse. Ask yourself if a product is contributing to the destruction of the planet. It’s amazing how much stuff we don’t need that is made from chemicals that end up polluting our rivers and seas and which comes back through the food chain to make us chronically ill.
Q: How does the Trinity health box help mental health?
Finn: Most of our boxes will be variations on a theme. The Trinity health box offers ambient snacks scientifically proven to help with mood, anxiety or mild depression and are excellent for the heart and gut. The fibre-rich snacks in the box will assist the gut in producing a healthy microbiome, which in turn helps release serotonin – the happy hormone that transfers to the brain. The gut-brain axis is vital to overall mental and physical well-being.
Sorcha: During the lockdown, many people suffered mental health issues. I and many of my friends became more anxious. My Mum made sure to feed me specific organic food known to overcome negative feelings, specifically mood-boosting foods. For example, chicken and turkey contain tryptophan, an essential amino acid which can help produce serotonin, the happy chemical. Tryptophan needs carbohydrates to be able to reach the brain. If you’re vegan or vegetarian, Sunflower seeds, peanuts and pumpkin seeds also contain trytophan.
Q: What do you hope to achieve with Medjuica?
Finn: We want people to be aware of the choices they make. We tend to eat snacks mindlessly, but if you’re presented with these carefully selected ingredients, at least you know you’ve strengthened your immune system and nourished your gut, mind and heart.
Sorcha: I think the government needs to get more involved in the general health of our nation. Living in France and Spain, if you walk into a supermarket in those countries, it’s wall to wall with healthy options like nuts, seeds, olives, legumes, wild tinned fish, sardines, and olive oil. No wonder Spain is the top in Europe for longevity. You walk into a typical Irish supermarket and immediatly run the gauntlet of ultra-processed foods such as cakes and biscuits. Why can’t we connect the dots? We might be living longer, but the quality of life is deteriorating. I get particularly incensed when I see the Ronald McDonald brand in hospitals. It presents itself as a charitable white knight paying for families to stay near their sick kids. Unfortunately, it’s reinforcing the relationship with fast food, so kids end up coming back through the revolving hospital door as adults with chronic diseases. We want to be a generation that disrupts the status quo and changes the complacency which has set in.
We hope Medjuica goes some way to getting that health ball rolling and that it brings a modicum of truth to the industry.
