July 24, 2003– This year’s IFT Expo features ‘weighty’ news about the functional, nutritional ingredients offered by Orafti Active Food Ingredients. This year, Orafti is treating visitors to Booth 4118 to more than just a healthy sampling of tempting foods and beverages. They will also enjoy a dose of timely information about the weight loss benefits of Orafti’s calcium boosting, all-natural fiber ingredients.

Directly in line with today’s banner trends in the food, beverage and supplement industries, Orafti is spreading the news of its leading-edge chicory fiber products designed to drive the branding success of forward-looking consumer product formulators everywhere.

True, the benefits of Orafti’s ingredients have been thoroughly documented by clinical studies over the past several decades. Orafti’s products are ideally suited to support sorely needed adjustments to the sugar- and calorie-rich western diet in the face of such major public health concerns as obesity, diabetes, colon cancer, and more.

“New Research confirms superior effect of Raftilose Synergy 1 for increasing calcium absorption”

Dr. Steven Abrams, MD of the USDA/ARS Childrens Nutrition Research Center, Baylor College of Medicine recently published a groundbreaking clinical in the prestigious British Journal of Nutrition  investigating the effect of Raftilose® Synergy 1 in enhancing calcium absorption.  Raftilose® Synergy 1 is a proprietary inulin product enriched with oligofructose developed by Orafti.  The study used a double-blind placebo controlled design.  59 adolescent girls consumed 8g/day of Raftilose® Synergy 1 for 3 weeks, followed by a 2 week washout period after which the treatments were switched.  At the end of each treatment period, the subjects calcium absorption was measured using a sophisticated dual Ca isotope tracer technique – the only technique recognized by experts to measure absolute calcium absorption and retention of calcium in the body.  Results showed that calcium absorption increased by 18% when consuming Raftilose® Synergy 1.  Perhaps more importantly, there was no increase in urinary calcium excretion for the Synergy group, indicating that the calcium was retained in the body. 

Raftilose® Synergy 1 is the most effective ingredient available for increasing calcium absorption because of its unique chain length distribution – containing short, medium and long chain molecules. Since different chain lengths are known to be fermented at different rates, this leads to fermentation throughout the entire length of the colon.  Therefore Raftilose® Synergy 1 activates the entire lower GI tract to absorb more calcium.   In fact in the above clinical, FOS (a shorter chain fructan that is fermented rapidly) was also tested at 8 g day and showed no effect. These results are in line with the work of Tahiri et al published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (2003) that also showed no increase in calcium absorption when consuming 10g of FOS per day.  
 
The world’s only supplier of both inulin and oligofructose products and a leader in the fields of applications development, process technologies and nutritional research, Orafti is able to offer its manufacturing clients the broadest product line available in the industry.  Orafti US is part of the Orafti Group which operates worldwide in more than 60 countries. For more information Orafti US, 101 Lindenwood Drive, Malvern, PA

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