June 2015

Though she be but little, she is fierce.

 — Shakespeare, A Midsommer Nights Dreame

Who would have thought that a small nonprofit organization in Carmel, IN could unlock the secret to preventing chronic malnutrition worldwide?  Glenn H. Sullivan, PhD (chairman/CEO Quintessence Nutraceuticals, Inc.; co‑founder, Sustainable Nutrition International; senior partner, Intermark Partners Strategic Management, LLC; professor emeritus, Food Science Institute, Purdue University; recipient, USPTO Patents for Humanity Award) told us how he and his co-inventors (U.S. patent US8,945,642) became alchemists by learning how to turn trash into treasure.

An estimated 925 million individuals were malnourished in 2010.  One third of the children in developing countries (and many in Indiana) suffer from chronic malnutrition, a condition that kills them or prevents them from becoming independent adults.  Malnutrition could be prevented with rice, a cereal grain rich in nutrition (nutraceuticals) grown by almost all developing countries.  But rice locks 68% of its nutrition in bran (skin of a grain of rice), which can be digested by cows but not by people.  So, until now, rice bran has been discarded or fed to livestock.

Mr. Sullivan and colleagues to the rescue.  Their manufacturing process extracts the nutrition from bran and makes it available to children for 10 to 12 cents per serving as a semi‑sweet powder (with a shelf life of 3 years) that dissolves in liquids like water or milk.  Developing countries can produce the powder using only off-the-shelf equipment.  Testing the powder in Central America (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras) resulted in a decrease of malnutrition, from 38% of children with malnutrition at the start of the trial to only 5% of children with malnutrition at the end of the trial 10 months later.  Yesterday’s annual 40 million tons of agricultural waste can today save millions of children from death or debilitating illness.

Ever alert to new opportunities, Mr. Sullivan is now using the powder to remediate type 2 diabetes (e.g., by decreasing retinopathy) and to provide old folks with the additional nutrition they need.  Two heaping teaspoons of the powder per day provides most of the nutrition an adult needs (rumor has it that the powder mixes well with bourbon).

Thank you for inspiring us, Mr. Sullivan!