sportsfoods Archives — Stardust Komms

UK FSA: EFSA’s safety concerns will not provoke CBD product removals

EFSA’s decision this week to stop the clock on 150 CBD (cannabidiol) Novel Food applications and publish a litany of ‘data gaps’ does not threaten thousands of onmarket CBD products in the UK, its Food Standards Agency (FSA) has told NutraIngredients.

The agency has itself held similar safety concerns for more than two years that have not been deemed significant enough to shift the safety needle against some 5,980 FSA-registered CBD offerings transitionally permitted on British brick and click shelves while it engages in its own assessments of around 900
industry-submitted safety dossiers.

“The information available does not provide sufficient evidence of a safety risk to determine that an immediate product removal is appropriate, based on the legal balance that must be made,” FSA Senior Communications Manager, Lisa Nelson, told NutraIngredients.

“So while we do not have evidence of harm relating to CBD products, there is also no evidence to show they are safe. The independent Committee on Toxicity has reviewed the existing CBD evidence and from that we have developed consumer advice on consuming CBD.”

That advice continues to be that healthy adults should consume a maximum of 70mg of CBD per day and vulnerable groups like pregnant and breastfeeding women and those on medications should not take it all.

Nelson added: “If we find credible evidence to say that CBD isolates or synthetic products in general, or specific products containing CBD, risk harm to the public, they will be removed from sale.”

The European Industrial Hemp Association (EIHA), which has submitted dossiers to the FSA representing more than 100 of its full-spectrum and isolate CBD-manufacturing members, supported EFSA’s work and publication.

“EFSA did this to help applicants improve their chances,” EIHA Managing Director, Lorenza Romanese, told us.

“So we support that. There are no surprises here really whether it is for isolates or full-spectrum CBD – the gaps have been known for a long time."

More here...

Personalized sports nutrition gets its game on

With the global sports nutrition market worth something in the vicinity of €15 billion and personalized nutrition around €2-3bn, according to market analysts – the cross-over of personalized sports nutrition in 2021 is relatively niche.

Philipp Merk, co-founder and managing director at German personalized nutrition firm Loewi, says sports nutrition accounts for the biggest slice of his firm’s business – about 40% (immunity being the next biggest chunk).

Loewi was founded in early 2019 as a spin-off from a Technical University of Munich, Olympic athlete-focused personalized nutrition project. Its model feeds blood sample biomarker data and questionnaire responses through algorithms to make its mostly food supplement (but also food recommendations) that typically cost users about €75 a month.

“We have basically combined this super-laborious method with my background in data science and artificial intelligence to make it scalable,” Merk says. “So we have a blood test you do at home independent of a doctor and a database of over 15,000 medical studies.”

“We have thousands of interactions between nutrients, diseases, medications, allergies – really everything that is known – and this is also how we can make sure we are never harming any of our customers.”

Merk says Loewi’s ever-growing data set was driving evermore refined recommendations.

“We have algorithms calculating the individual dose for each nutrient and with each blood test that we conduct we use machine learning to build a mathematical model of their metabolism. We basically have a curve where we know which dosage we need to achieve which blood value. The cool thing is with each customer that comes through the system our model gets better and better. It’s like self-improving machinery.”

More here.

Europeans tackle doping problem in sports nutrition

The first-ever pan-European good manufacturing practice (GMP) for sports nutrition is the topic of hot debate as industry weighs up whether it will help enforce quality and weed out bad actors lacing products with doping analogs like steroids and stimulants.

Specialized Nutrition Europe (SNE) and The European Federation of Associations of Health Product Manufacturers (EHPM) argue the voluntary GMP will build confidence in the sector among elite and other athletes.

However, the European Specialized Sports Nutrition Alliance (ESSNA), Europe’s largest sports nutrition-focused industry body, says the standard is ill-defined and will sow confusion.

More here.