Blog 3 What is our Product

What is our Product?

Now that we have identified a broad area that our product will target it was time to put the heads down and uncover some concrete information that could lead to the formulation of a product. As mentioned before one of our team members was a sufferer of Crohns Disease. A Gastrointestinal (GI) Disorder is a disease which affects the digestive tract and can cause any number of problems such as; nausea, abdominal pain, constipation, diarrhoea, fatigue and many others.

We found that Gastrointestinal Disorders can be split into two categories. Irritable Bowl Syndromes, which are unknown causes of abdominal pain but not associated to defects in the digestive tract, and Irritable Bowl Disease, which are defects which cause the intestines to sometimes become inflamed causing diseases like Crohns and Ulcerative Colitis. In the beginning we struggled to find much information on these topics, but after speaking to a student studying medicine I was pointed in the direction of the medical associations set up to inform and support people with these issues. They were a great help as the information was clear, understandable and up to date.

The information that we gathered was pretty consistent in that there was no “one cure” for Gastrointestinal Disorders. They could affect anyone male/female, adult/child and from any part of the world. This led us to the idea of producing a product that could be consumed by all and equally had the same beneficial effect on them. But developing a product that just cures a disease isn’t as easy as finding the disease, as we soon found out.

With our background being Food Science we obviously decided that would be our best chance of having a reasonable product and began our research in the very topical area of Functional Foods. An awful lot of our course in the last while has been built around functional foods and how they can be developed and used to treat illnesses. With that in mind we each began research on a different area of functional foods and found two areas heavily associated with the remission of GI Disorders, Vitamins and Probiotics. With a large slice of luck, it turned out the one of our group members was conducting his thesis based on a probiotic functional drink, which would have the added benefits of the vitamins provided by the fruit or vegetables incorporated.