BioLumen: Structured ‘super-expanding’ natural fibers for digestive health and weight management
Structured ‘super-expanding’ natural fibers that can capture fats and sugars in the stomach and prevent their absorption in the small intestine could help reduce calorie intakes and deliver digestive health benefits, claims San Francisco-based BioLumen, one of 10 startups selected by PepsiCo to participate in the fifth cohort of its Greenhouse Accelerator program. (Pic credit: BioLumen)
Co-founded by serial entrepreneur Paolo Costa, and Dr Robert Lustig, a neuroendocrinologist and author of popular science books such as ‘Fat Chance: Beating the Odds against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease,’ BioLumen has engineered an ingredient combining natural polysaccharides that captures sugars and fats in the stomach.
These sugar and fats ‘micro-jelly-balls’ then navigate unabsorbed through the small intestine – where fats and sugars are usually digested and utilized by the body – and arrive in the large intestine.
Part of these encapsulated sugars and fats are then “released inside the colon, feeding the microbiome and increasing the bacterial production of beneficial short-chain fatty acids (a prebiotic function), while the rest of the unabsorbed trapped nutrients are naturally excreted (a caloric elimination function),” claims Costa.
“Of course BioLumen does not succeed to absorb all the sugars,” he says. “We are talking here in percentages. BioLumen is going to just decrease the percentage of sugars absorbed. Right now, 1g of BioLumen seems to be able to eliminate 5g of sugar. It means that 6 g of BioLumen per day would eliminate 30g of sugar daily. That would be already a quarter of US average daily sugar ingestion. That alone would reduce the average US person body weight by 15lbs per year."