Sunday, February 06, 2011

Nestle is playing in the big league of health additives

Did you know that Nestlé has launched Nestlé Health Science SA, a company based in Lausanne set up to develop a scientific base for personalized health science and nutrition. It will develop and launch specialist food-based products to help prevent and treat conditions such as Alzheimer's disease, diabetes and heart disease. Swiss scientists say it will be possible for food-based products to reduce the symptoms of diseases and treat them, though some are skeptical conditions such as diabetes can be totally prevented.

The line between food and disease prevention is closing fast. Soon it will not be good enough to eat a healthy diet but one with the right balance of disease prevention additives.

This market will be zillions of dollars.

Just to give you a taste of what is happening (excuse the pun). Nestlé has recently acquired a U.K.-based pharmaceutical start-up testing a chewing gum to help kidney-disease sufferers.

I would think there will be plenty more of these acquisitions since the Health Science subsidiary has over half a billion dollars to invest.

Using the company’s words it seeks to make a "quantum leap" in a sector that Nestlé has been trying to crack at least since the late 1980s. Dick Stroud

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