Morpeth health supplement firm aiming for slimline tonic

Posted by Simon Honeysett on Oct 14, 08 03:56 PM in News

A HEALTH supplement business in Morpeth has won the right to launch a fat-fighting plant extract in the UK.

Morpeth-based Healtharena is selling a plant carotenoid called fucoxanthin, which has been used successfully to help obese people lose weight in the US.

Healtharena staff with Diane Scott front centre

The brown seaweed extract, which is mixed with pomegranate seed oil, is sold via Healtharena's shops in Morpeth and Blyth and through its website to end users and health food shops around the UK.

"We are the only people who have it manufactured for us. It is available in America but we are the only UK company that does it," said Healtharena's product development manager Diane Scott, who has lost 9lb in eight weeks while taking the product.

Diane set up the business, which has seven staff, originally as a health food shop then more recently moved into making supplements.

"I started 26 years ago with a health food shop in Ashington. We have been manufacturing for six years. We started manufacturing when we couldn't get a product that we wanted," she said.

The products are mainly made in Southern Ireland and bottled in England, although the fucoxanthin supplement is made in the US and packaged in the UK under Healtharena's Advanced Nutrition brand.

Diane discovered the supplement in a US magazine to which she subscribes in order to find new products for the British market. "It's a long term weight loss product. It was used in Japan, they were doing tests with it as an antioxidant for cancer and the side effect was weight loss, but it was a very slow weight loss," she said.

"We are starting to get feedback. People sometimes want miraculous things but it doesn't work like that."

The product works by targeting white fat cells which commonly gather around the middle of the body around the menopause - the typical 'middle-aged spread'.

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