The ingredient already has a Health Functional Food Ingredient Certificate in South Korea, allowing all finished products to claim: “can help urinary tract health by inhibiting adherence of harmful bacteria to urinary tract”.
“The recent health claim approvals from Canada and South Korea independently validate the strength of the scientific substantiation that we’ve built in support of Pacran,” said Dan Souza Sr. Director of Sales and Marketing for Naturex-DBS. “Naturex-DBS will continue to invest in developing gold standard clinical evidence with an eye towards achieving additional Pacran urinary tract health claims around the world.”
The Canadian approval means that, with a minimum daily dose of 500 mg, all finished products using the ingredient can make claims such as “helps prevent recurrent urinary tract infections in women” or “used in Herbal Medicine to help prevent (recurrent) urinary tract infections”, said the company.
UTI infections affect 53% of women and 14% of men at least once in their lives, according to PLoS Pathogens journal. Such infections lead to 6.8m medical providers’ office visits, 1.3m emergency room visits and 245,000 hospitalizations a year - costing about $2.4bn each year.