New line of practitioner supplements billed as 'multivitamin' among probiotics

10-Sep-2018 - Last updated on 11-Sep-2018 at 14:33 GMT

Practitioner channel specialist Designs for Health has bet on a high CFU count and branded, proprietary strains to create a line of probiotic supplements that it says has garnered the confidence of health care providers.

The new line, called ProbioMed, consists of three probiotic supplement products, one that offers a dosage of 50 billion CFU, another at 150 billion and a third at 250 billion.

Designs for Health (DFH) marketing director Neal Mercado said the company has put all of its eggs in one basket with supplier UAS Labs. UAS and its resident expert Greg Leyer, PhD, had a convincing suite of data, Mercado said.

“We took a decision as a company to step away from the generic strains and really put our money where our mouths were to deliver something that we could be really transparent with our practitioners about,” Mercado said.

Data backs choice of species

Mercado came on with DFH fairly recently after a number of years running a practitioner line in Asia for Blackmores, the Australian brand.

“Coming into this space with different regulations I wanted to partner with someone who really know his stuff,” Mercado said. “I have never seen the kind of data that Greg has on his strains. He has DNA characterizations, clinical data and more.”

The new supplements feature a wide range of probiotic species. These include Bifidobacterium lactis (BI 04), Lactobacillus acidophilus (DDS-1), Lactobacillus plantarum (UAL—05) as well as seven others. The dosages in the 50 billion CFU product range from 18 billion down to 1 billion. In the higher CFU count products, the same species are present in similar ratios, Mercado said.

The company chose a new delivery mode that made the new product possible, Mercado said.

“We have had a few probiotics in the past and we used a different delivery system. It protected the probiotics as they passed through the intestinal fluid but the downside as that we were limited in the number of strains we could use and the total CFU count we could put into the capsules,” Mercado said.

“We started looking for really robust strains that had good data on digestive survivability. We definitely want to deliver as broad of a diversity of strains as possible,” Mercado said.

Probiotic multi

probiomed 50 — The new Designs for Health probiotic supplements feature 10 branded stains.

Mercado said UAS has data on the specific benefits of each strain, which is why they were chosen and presented at their respective ratios.

“We kind of think of it as a multivitamin for probiotics. These are all human derived strains with specific benefits. L. plantarum, for example, inhibits E.coli; L. paracasei can inhibit salmonella and listeria,” he said.

“The way we have coined this internally is that this is kind of a symphony and not a piece played by a soloist,” Mercado said.

Mercado said the products were introduced in mid summer and the response has been beyond the company’s expectations.

“They have done very well. We are sold out at the moment. I think these products have found an unmet need among our practitioners,” he said.