Nestlé scientists combine exercise benefits with taste

TUCKED away near Lake Geneva, a handful of Nestlé scientists are quietly working on realising every couch potato’s dream: exercise that comes in a bottle.

The world’s biggest food company says it has identified how an enzyme in charge of regulating metabolism can be stimulated by a compound called C13, a potential first step in developing a way to mimic the fat-burning effect of exercise. The findings were published in the science journal Chemistry & Biology in July.

Eight scientists at the Nestlé Institute of Health Sciences in Lausanne, Switzerland, are looking for natural substances that can act as triggers.

Nestlé’s commitment to this type of project illustrates how the company is working to address consumers’ disenchantment with packaged food by formulating products that can do more than sate hunger.

“The border between food and pharma will narrow in the coming years,” said Jean-Philippe Bertschy, an analyst at Bank Vontobel in Zurich. “Companies with a diversified, healthy food portfolio will emerge as the winners.”

The numbers already point that way. Consumers’ appetite for food perceived to bring a health benefit, such as gluten-free pasta and organic juice, is forecast to outpace growth in traditional packaged food through 2019 after doing so almost every year in the past decade, according to research firm Euromonitor International. – Bloomberg