Following the announcement today from Kelloggs to cut the amount of sugar in its three top selling children’s cereals, we caught up with Stephen O’Hara, CEO of OptiBiotix Health PLC (LON:OPTI) for his thoughts:
“We are really pleased with the progress we are making in this area which opens up opportunities for the development of a range of natural sweet healthy prebiotic fibres which can be used to replace sugar or as high intensity natural sweetness in food and beverages. With growing consumer interest in healthy lifestyles public interest and political concerns over traditional sugars and artificial sweeteners OptiBiotix is leading research in an area of growing industry interest.”
OptiBiotix is in the Sweet Spot of developing solutions with SweetBiotix®. This is an innovative concept with the potential to address a global requirement, addressing international concerns over the impact of sugar on obesity, with the prospect of replacing ‘unhealthy’ sugars in existing products with non-digestible, low calorie, healthy, SweetBiotix®. These sweet natural healthy sugars are not digested in the human gut and hence calorie free.
In the last twelve months, OptiBiotix has accelerated its development programmes in this area and have carried out a number of independent human studies which demonstrate the potential for two types of products:-
- Sweet natural sweet prebiotics which can be used to replace sugar in food and beverages. These may be classified as dietary fibres, which from an industry and consumer perspective, creates the prospect of substituting high calorie sugars with sweet healthy fibres
- High intensity natural sweeteners showing sweetness of between 140X and 223X that of sucrose at equivalent concentrations, with a large reduction in bitterness when compared to Stevia.
