Originally published December 7 2005
Natural health company buys rights to olive polyphenol use in nutritional products
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
BioActor, a company that develops natural health products, has licensed the worldwide rights to French patents on using olive polyphenols in herbal medicines, supplements and foods for the prevention of osteoporosis.
Now, BioActor, a natural health product development company set up six months ago as a spin-off from Ghent University, has licensed the worldwide rights to INRA's patents on using olive polyphenols for osteoporosis prevention in food, supplements and herbal medicines.
"There has been no other research done on the bone-sparing effects of olive polyphenols and there are no other patents covering this application," noted Hans van der Saag, the founder and CEO of BioActor (www.bio-actor.com).
Bone health is set to become a major segment of the supplements and functional foods market, as ageing populations and the additional strain from obesity swell the numbers affected by osteoporosis.
Already the lifetime risk for a woman to have an osteoporotic fracture is 30-40 per cent and in men the risk is about 13 per cent.
But while the World Health Organisation calls the condition its biggest global healthcare problem, the main natural product targeted at bone health -- calcium supplements -- is entering a mature category, and a recent report from Frost & Sullivan warns that the supplements are set to see 'fierce cannibalisation' of sales from therapeutic drugs as consumers look for faster remedies.
At INRA, researchers led by Dr Veronique Coxam at the Clermont Ferrand unit, were inspired by epidemiological evidence showing that people who ate a traditional Mediterranean diet were less likely to have osteoporosis.
This animal model is designed to represent senile osteoporosis, or the bone-wasting condition that effects the elderly, as it combines both hormone deficiency with chronic inflammation.
The animals do not fully recover all of their bone density compared to controls, but in this research, those rats fed with oleuropin recovered about 70-75 per cent of their bone density, a 50 per cent improvement on those that were not fed the supplement.
"The target population will be those over the age of 60," said Van der Saag.
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