Provexis: Tomato extract with sports nutrition potential
23 Oct 2018 | Provexis
Provexis’ patented tomato extract has increasingly moved into sports nutrition applications, with Niamh O’Kennedy, Director of R&D, noting she is “optimistic” for a future sports nutrition health claim. DSM markets Provexis' tomato extract as Fruitflow, which has over 30 platelet compounds and is said to counteract the adverse effects of over-exercise on inflammation.
This is Ron wires at Food Valley Conference in the Netherlands and I'm here with Neil Kennedy from Provexis.
Which is a supplier of the ingredient fruit flow.
Neve, this ingredient was initially done really around blood platelet platelet aggregation, but there's really a lot of expansion recently.
What can you give us a background and how you're really targeting the sports nutrition sector too now?
Sure, , fruit flow has been in development for a number of years, and as you say, it is focused on the blood platelet, and it contains a large number of compounds which affect blood platelets specifically.
But blood platelets, we have a health claim for, for maintaining normal platelet aggregation.
Blood platelets are implicated in so many other biological systems that it's natural to look more further afield.
And one of the trials that we've done recently was in blood pressure, for example, where we saw an effect on blood pressure after consuming fruit flow, and we've also looked into sports nutrition because blood platelets.
Are also implicated in recovery and the resilience of the system and any way of promoting this resilience is beneficial for recovery.
What's been the sports nutrition work around this because there was a lot of that you were doing together with elite athletes we've done some initial work with the help of some rowers and we've recreational athletes just to gauge how The effect of exercises on blood platelets and the literature does does report, you know, considerable effects on coagulation and blood platelets, but we wanted a more, more of an idea of of what a specific exercise regime would really do to your blood platelets.
And so we've used different types of of of exercise to to get an idea of the effect in trained athletes versus the effect in the general population.
And recently we've looked also at supplementing the fruit flow for people who are undertaking their normal training activities to see if it reduces the effects of exercise on the way the platelets work and the activation that this can cause to the system, and we found a significant reduction.
What what sort of results were they more specifically?
We looked at the effects of of of fruit flow on how.
Platelets activate.
We found that we were able to almost completely suppress the platelet activation that occurred.
And once we had suppressed the platelet activation, then the inflammation this also generated was reduced by about 50%.
OK.
And what was the work that you did at the Tour de France this year?
This year at the Tour de France and at the Giro actually, one of the pro cycling teams decided to try fruit flow to see how it.
Affect their performance during the races.
So this is a testing use and in both cases, they, they reported very, very good results, and we can't say that it's entirely due to fruit flow because we haven't finished, you know, testing the ingredients, but certainly by taking fruit flow they did they did report beneficial results on their power outputs and and their their general resilience through through the the the long races.
Now the, the initial health claim that you achieved led to a significant coverage and and also the investment or licensing agreement together with DSM, but what what what are your plans now from a health claims perspective from down the sports nutrition route?
We need to do some more trials to see whether the, the, the effects that we've seen so far, are persist on a, on a, on a long term basis.
There's, there's scope for proprietary claims, of course, if one does the studies and, and, and if the effects are strong enough to be recognized as beneficial.
And so we'll just have to see how the research pans out, but certainly we wouldn't rule it out.
Optimistic.
Yes, OK, thank you, Roisin.
