United States
New Zealand
Darcy is in Doha, he sent back a photo waxing lyrical at the beauty he saw. I looked at the same photo and saw my anathema - concrete and straight lines.
“They paved paradise, put up a parking lot.” Joni Mitchell.
Darcy is an engineer, I am a biologist. Darcy loves concrete where he can control the variables to produce the perfect, functioning product. I love marvelling at how one blackcurrant will never be the same as another.
Between us, we have managed to celebrate the wonderful variation in blackcurrants to produce a consistently efficacious respiratory health product to downgrade inflammation and repair lung tissue.
We have put a huge amount of work into ensuring that during the drying process we do not lose the bioactivity of the blackcurrants. Darcy’s engineering skills are magical for this. In most commercially available blackcurrant juices and extracts, heat and other processes destroy bioactivity and the remaining product is a sugary drink with few health benefits.
It’s interesting to understand why blackcurrants are so good for breathing. We often talk about the anthocyanins in blackcurrants but by doing that, we are ignoring what else is there.
Blackcurrants are rich in many compounds including other polyphenols, like hydroxycinnamic acids and different types of flavonoids (anthocyanins are a sub-group of flavonoids). On top of that, there are many different types of anthocyanins and in New Zealand we grow blackcurrants with high levels of all these compounds. You can read more about it here.
There are hundreds, if not thousands of compounds in blackcurrants. These compounds are dynamic and can change state during the life of the plant and during the storage process. Each of these compounds is influenced by the season the blackcurrants grow in, the soil, the altitude, the climate, where they grow on the vine and the genetics of the plant. And all those variables interact. To try and understand the variation, scientists design statistical experiments to work out the effect of one variable change on another – but we can never design an experiment big enough to capture all the interactions.
To add more complexity to the mix, we also need to try and understand the impact of all that variation inside variable human bodies – variation within one human body is huge, let alone variation across multiple humans – crazy!
We are gathering more information about Zestt Breathe+ products all the time. We have a Masters student in Botany at University of Otago, working with us to understand the variation at a plant level. We are also working to better determine how the product works in humans in clinical trials, with the University of Otago and Dunedin Hospital.
Why are we doing this? The more we understand, the more efficacious and consistent we can make our products. In time, we will be able to make medical claims by going through the appropriate regulatory processes.
It is much simpler to control the variation in a pharmaceutical medicine compared with a naturally-derived medicine. Pharmaceuticals are synthetically-derived chemical compounds manufactured in climate-controlled facilities. But what are they missing? Just like Darcy’s picture of the streets of Doha.
In our Zestt Breathe+ product, we walk the line between controlling and celebrating nature’s incredible variation. As a biologist I want to understand that variation and as a nature lover, I recognise I never will. That is the enigma of natural products.
All the best, Anna and Darcy.
If you would like to discuss any of this further, please contact Darcy or Anna (who you can contact at +64 27 599 2255 or +64 27 4861418 respectively) or via info@zesttwellness.com.