Five minutes at FI Europe  with … 

Eric Chappuis
Senior Nutrition Science Manager

Agro Food Industry Hi-Tech: What can you tell me about health applications of your oligosaccharides?
Eric Chappuis: We produce mostly plant-based galacto-oligosaccharides (GOS) from legumes which are quite unique on the market. The first application targeted with this ingredient has been satiety, through our CravingZ’Gone® declination of the ingredient, with effects backed by a portfolio of preclinical and clinical studies The benefits of plant-based GOS are mediated mostly by modulating the gut microbiota through changes in fermentation patterns and metabolic activity of the microbiota. CravingZ’Gone® improves satiety but more importantly it is also able to modulate additional metabolic parameters in a dose-dependent manner. For instance it decreases metabolic endotoxemia, that is the passage of bacterial lipopolysaccharides from the gut to the general blood circulation. This is a key parameter connected to low grade inflammation, which in turn is important in the pathogenesis of metabolic syndrome.

We have shown also, in a trial soon to be published, that CravingZ’Gone® improves insulin sensitivity in overweight people.

We now want to tackle non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, one of the biggest health issues in the population, affecting 10 to 20% of people worldwide. To do so we have adopted a fit-for purpose approach by using the satiating human dose as the reference to perform the proof-of-concept on an animal model of fatty liver. This is quite important as animal trials generally involve high doses of bioactive substances, and the transposition to Humans then becomes very difficult. Here we have shown that a low dose of plant-based GOS prevents non-alcoholic fatty liver development. We believe that plant-based GOS will have an important role in fatty liver prevention and in other parts of the metabolic syndrome. This could be due to the fact that in Western diets people eat little legumes, and re-introducing back these fibers could fill a key nutritional gap. The populations we target do not eat balanced diets.

AF: How do these galacto-oligosaccharides work?
EC: What we see emerging in the literature is that the gut microbiota is the key organ modulating energy metabolism. In the last ten years the scientific community described different mechanisms of action where the fermentation patterns and metabolites production by the microbiota can modulate different hormones or hypothalamic pathways. They also have local effects tightening the gap junctions between cells or modulating the gut immune system. We know more and more but the exact mechanism is still unclear.

AF: What other health benefits do Olygose galacto-oligosaccharides provide?
EC: Modulating the microbiota may have impacts on a large scope of mechanisms, which makes the field of potential applications very wide too.  We are, in particular, looking at i sports nutrition, since a healthy gut health can influence positively the recovery or the performance of athletes, depending on the targeted microbial communities. We are also going towards the cosmetic path; we have trials that show how galacto-oligosaccharides can improve skin hydration, for example, and even for topical application. We see requests also for improving immune function. This is a delicate area because it is quite hard to demonstrate an effect on immunity conclusively. But we know that there are effects strengthening the immune system in humans.

AF: How do you process your galacto-oligosaccharides?
EC: They belong to the raffinose family of oligosaccharides, which is common in many plants of the Leguminosae (legumes), our main source being pea or soy. We extract and purify them, removing proteins and minerals, and we also remove the fructose terminals in order to increase their stability in various media and mitigate the gas build in the gut, which is a side effects of most fermentable fibers. You can find this kind of fibers in natural food products such as fermented soy, it is nothing really artificial.

AF: What trends you identify for the future of prebiotics?
EC: Beyond the trends, the issue is that microbiota and prebiotic interventions are important at all stages of life, including early life. There are more and more studies pointing at how the microbiota composition is maintained for long, and thus intervening early can affect health at later stages. Beyond 50 years old, people start to change their microbiota, and thus we need interventions to support a healthy microbiota as long as possible. There are many new types of interventions coming in the field, even trying to tackle diseases such as autism spectrum disorder, exploiting the gut-brain axis. If this proves to work, it could be huge.

AF: What can we expect from Olygose next year?
EC: We have more clinical trials incoming! There is an ongoing trial, part of a European project called SATIN which aim is to determine the role of satiating foods/substnaces in long-term weight management in individuals, avoiding the so-called “yo yo effect”. It is an innovative approach, since there are not many active ingredients that target this part of weight loss programs.