Unhealty diet among Malaysian- A lot of Malaysians are practicising unhealty diet. Report from WHO and MANS (Malaysian Adult Nutrition study) stated that around 80% of Malaysians do not consume enough vegetables in their daily diets. This will eventually lead to health issue such as obesity, diabetic, heart problem etc. Hectic lifesytle is the norm excuses given for not taking vegetables in their diet. Cosmos powder is designed to address this problem. The powder is designed in a convenient way so that it can be incoorperated into many foods at any time.
An efective and safe functional food products-Functional food can be defined as foods that are capable of providing positive effects on health beyond that of basic nutrition. Development of this kind of products must undergo sufficient analysis to verify its safety and effectiveness. However, many functional food products available in the market were developed and marketed wrongly. Many of them simply adapt research findings published elsewhere and sometime can be wrogly interperated and costumer testimonials as their marketing strategy. The bioactive ingredients may have not been correctly controlled and the usage of synthetic and harmfull materials can sometime been detected in their products. Cosmos powder is produced following the established and systematic procedures to ensure that it is safe and effective. The plant is cultivated under specified degree of conditions for maximum synthesis of bioactive compounds and subsequently used as the raw materials for cosmos powder preparation. It then undergoes several optimized processes and tested at multiple levels involving in vitro, in vivo and clinical studies on healthy and diabetic patients to verify and confirm the safety and efficacy of the product.
Standardized Cosmos powder (serbuk ulam raja) with potent antidiabetic and antioxidant properties has been developed from Cosmos caudatus leaf. Throughout the development processes, specific seed variety, leaf maturity, age of the plant, processing stages are the important parameters that have been optimized. For the standardization process, bioactive compounds in the Cosmos powder were identified and quantified using NMR and HPLC. Cosmos powder offers a great deal of benefits as follows; 1) Cosmos powder is one of a kind product in Malaysia with green and halal, affordable and better than currently used drug like metformin. 2) Standardized Cosmos powder can be utilized as a food ingredient in many functional food products such as cosmos ice-cream, cosmos tea, cosmos condiments and cosmos sachet. 3) Cosmos powder exhibited potent antidiabetic property as determined via in vitro and in vivo studies coupled with NMR-based metabolomic analysis in experimental animals in addition to clinical studies involving both healthy and diabetic patients.
Advantages
Dr. Ahmad Haniff Jaafar
Faculty of Food Science and Technology, UPM
a_hanif@upm.edu.my
Date of Input: 27/02/2020 | Updated: 27/02/2020 | asrizam
Office of the Deputy Vice Chancellor (Research and Innovation)
Universiti Putra Malaysia
43400 Serdang, Selangor, Malaysia