Biodiversity as an Innovation Engine for the Nutraceutical Industry ⚙️ 🌿
Thank You Nutritional Outlook!
At FNIS I was interviewed by Nicholas Saraceno from Nutritional Outlook about the EBI Network and my talk on Innovation and Biodiversity. I will be posting more about this, but here is the scoop, as reported by Nutritional Outlook. Check out the article /interview here: https://www.nutritionaloutlook.com/view/biodiversity-innovation-engine-nutraceutical-industry
In a Nutshell: The problems we face today are different than the problems we faced in the past during what I call the “First Wave of Plant Based Innovation”.
Today we face a very large burden of chronic disease, with 6 in 10 Americans having some form of chronic disease, and those numbers continuing to rise.
The problems of the past were more concerning acute problems, like infection, disease and maleria, which were dealt with using reductionistic science- single cause, single target, single molecule type problems.
The disease burden of today is systemic, inflammatory, multifactorial and complex and develops over decades.
➡️ Complexity theory says that to solve a complex problem, we need a complex solution.
✅ And this is the challenge our industry was built for: Botanicals are not like drugs; Botanicals have a super power. They are complex, as they have multiple bioactives that affect multiple pathways in emergent and context-dependent ways.
Biodiversity is the source of the innovatiion of the past and of the future for our industry and we are losing it fast. I see few companies really concerned or ethically utilizing it as an innovation asset, and this is why I have created the EBI Network.