Developing and building on our product concept....

Now that we have a concept for a product to design we can look into it more and build up on it. Why we chose the idea of a product/ supplementation to help treat the symptoms of Inflammatory Bowel Disease is because I myself am a sufferer of Crohns Disease and know all about the difficulties of living with such a condition. I thought it would be good to develop an idea to help other sufferers of IBD as there is relatively little known about the ailment but more knowledge is being gained and researched on about it in recent times.

There were many things for me Shane & Seán to discuss and research to build our concept into a viable product. For example what research has been done into crohns and colitis? What causes it? What are its symptoms? What triggers a flare up? How is it treated and managed? Lucky enough I can draw on my own experiences of dealing with Crohns to answer some of these. The cause of IBD is not entirely known but flare ups of cramps, loss of appetite, blood loss in fecal matter, fatigue and anemia are common symptoms of the disease. Some immuno suppressant medication can be used to help deal with the inflammation of the bowel but the most important treatment is DIET.


There has been an increase in the amount of research done on nutraceutical treatments to help with IBD such as Vitamin D and Probiotics supplementation. With this in mind we set out to develop a product fortified with Vitamin D, has anti inflammatory properties and contains probiotics. But what kind of product should we go for? We wanted to go for something quick and easy to consume as a snack in the morning or lunch. A drink? A chocolate or granola bar?

We decided on a health drink that could be taken in the morning or for lunch. We still have some barriers to get past such as figure out how to fortify the drink with Vitamin D, what ingredients could give it an anti inflammatory property and also what probiotic strain would be most beneficial to use, should we make the product dairy or non dairy as many IBD suffers are lactose intolerant to some extent, what bioprocesses need to be used to achieve desired end product, what is the products shelf life, how to stabilize the product so that the ingredients can all be contained in product properly?

For a quick video on the importance of probiotics click on link --->https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2k8Puxz54FQ