The Supplement Industry Has Been Solving the Wrong Problem. DailyColours Is Solving the Right One

There are villages in Sardinia where an unusually high share of men born between 1880 and 1900 went on to reach 100 — the cluster that the demographers Michel Poulain and Gianni Pes mapped in 2004 and named the first Blue Zone (Experimental Gerontology, 39:1423–1429). Researchers have been studying them for decades, looking for the compound, the gene, the single explanation. The study that identified the zone concluded that the mechanism behind it remained unknown, and two decades on no one has narrowed it to a single explanation.

The Supplement Industry Has Been Asking the Wrong Question

For years, the healthy ageing supplement market has been chasing a single answer to a very complex question. Pick a compound, isolate its mechanism, and build a brand around it. NMN targets NAD decline. Spermidine targets cellular autophagy. Fisetin targets senescent cells. Each comes with a plausible-sounding biological story and, in most cases, evidence drawn from animal models or laboratory cell studies. Human trials exist for several of them, but they tend to be small and short, and they measure biomarkers rather than how people function day to day.

The problem here is systemic. Ageing is not a single-pathway event. Chronic inflammation, oxidative stress, declining immune function, reduced insulin sensitivity, and gut deterioration arrive together, compounding each other over years, and creating cellular damage. That is how the field itself now frames it: the hallmarks-of-ageing review published in Cell in 2023 by López-Otín and colleagues sets out twelve such processes and describes them as interconnected rather than reducible to one (Cell, 186:243–278).

Treating one pathway while ignoring the rest is a little like fixing a slow puncture in one tyre – on a car with four flat tyres.

In a 2021 commentary in the journal Food Frontiers, Jed Fahey and Thomas Kensler — both long associated with the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine — argued that phytochemicals, the plant compounds concentrated in colourful fruits, vegetables and herbs, are central to extending the healthy years of life, and that dietary guidelines largely ignore them. They were careful about how far the evidence reaches. Nutritional epidemiology points strongly towards benefit across nearly all chronic diseases, they wrote, but unequivocal proof is, in their word, “problematic”, given the kind of trials it would take (Food Frontiers, 2:235–239).

Public health bodies land in a similar place on food, though not on supplements. NHS guidance asks for at least five portions of a variety of fruit and vegetables a day. The Alzheimer’s Society recommends a Mediterranean-style pattern — plenty of fruit, vegetables and wholegrains, fish twice a week, olive oil in place of harder fats — while stating that no individual food, vitamin or supplement has been shown to change dementia risk. The UK’s Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition, in a February 2018 position statement on diet, cognitive impairment and dementia, judged the evidence base in this area very limited. None of these bodies endorses a colour-group theory of ageing, and none endorses a product.

What the Colours in Your Food Are Actually Doing

Most people understand that fruits and vegetables are good for them. Fewer understand why, and even fewer know that a large part of the answer is visible to the naked eye. The vivid red of a pomegranate, the deep blue-purple of a blackcurrant, the bright orange of a carrot: these colours are not decorative. They are biological signals of protective plant compounds called phytonutrients, produced by plants to defend themselves against solar radiation, microbial attack, and temperature stress. Many of the same compounds are biologically active in people, which is what makes them worth studying — though what a compound does inside a plant is not simply transferred to whoever eats it (Minich, Journal of Nutrition and Metabolism, 2019, reviews the colour-group evidence).

Almost everyone has heard of beta carotene — the orange nutrient in carrots, and maybe lycopene, the red nutrient in tomatoes. But there are hundreds of colour nutrients; Phenol-Explorer, the reference database used in the dietary-intake studies cited below, catalogues hundreds of individual polyphenols across common foods.

Scientists studying these compounds do group them by colour, each group carrying its own distinct biological actions, though the number of groups varies with the framework: most reviews and most consumer guidance work with five or six categories rather than four. DailyColours works with four — red, blue-purple, green and orange-yellow. The claim that combining all four produces an effect greater than the sum of its parts originates in the company’s own laboratory work and patent filings, where blended plant extracts shifted inflammation and cellular-energy markers in cell-based assays. No human trial has yet compared the four-colour blend against single-colour groups, so the synergy remains a mechanistic hypothesis rather than a clinical finding.

The Mediterranean Diet, with its emphasis on a wide variety of colourful plant foods, is the most extensively documented expression of this principle. In PREDIMED, a Spanish randomised trial in people at high cardiovascular risk, those assigned a Mediterranean diet supplemented with extra-virgin olive oil or nuts had fewer major cardiovascular events than the control group (New England Journal of Medicine, 2018). In the UK Biobank cohort, 60,298 adults followed for a mean of nine years showed up to 23 per cent lower dementia risk at the highest level of adherence, independent of genetic risk (Shannon et al., BMC Medicine, 2023) — a result the authors are careful to describe as observational, and so unable to establish cause.

The question that has occupied a team of UK researchers for the past four years is whether the spread of plant colours in that diet can be made reliably accessible — concentrated, standardised, and delivered to people who cannot manage the recommended five portions of fruit and vegetables a day, which, as the Exeter trial team notes, is fewer than a third of British adults. The work was funded by DailyColours, a disclosure carried in both published papers.

The result of that work is DailyColours, a supplement drawing on extracts from 16 Mediterranean fruits, vegetables, and herbs, which the company says carries more than 160 colour phytonutrients across all four plant colour groups. The formulation is covered by patents, among them US patent 12,213,506, which describes blends of plant materials drawn from several colour groups. A patent records that an invention has been judged novel and non-obvious; it is not a finding about clinical benefit, and the supporting data in the filings comes largely from cell-based assays rather than from people.

What the Clinical Evidence Shows

Two human trials followed the laboratory and formulation work, both of them company-funded. The first, led by researchers at King’s College London and published in Antioxidants in August 2024, was a randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled crossover study in 30 adults with a mean age of 67, each taking the supplement for one week and a placebo for one week. Its conclusions were modest, and the authors said so: effects on the inflammation, oxidative-stress and mitochondrial markers measured were minimal. A one-month open-label extension in 26 of those participants found hypermethylation at a single site in salivary DNA, cg13108341, moving against the direction that site usually takes with age. The paper called for longer and larger trials.

The second trial, run at the University of Exeter, was a 60-day, three-arm, double-blind, placebo-controlled study in 150 UK adults aged 50 and over with a BMI of 25 or above, comparing 750mg a day and 2,000mg a day against a placebo. It was published in Food & Function in May 2025 (O’Leary et al., 16:4505–4520), with a correction issued the following month. The investigators describe the trial as exploratory and mechanistic, and are explicit about its limits: the 150-participant sample gave roughly 45 per cent power to detect a small cognitive effect, which the paper acknowledges leaves it underpowered for a definitive answer.

The Exeter findings were presented at three major scientific conferences in 2025 — the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference in Toronto, the International Congress of Nutrition in Paris, and the Phytochemicals and Health Symposium in Exeter.

The results were narrower than a phrase such as “improved cognition” suggests. On attention, the 2,000mg group improved on a reaction-time task (Digit Vigilance; effect size 0.34, p=0.042), and both active groups improved on picture-recognition accuracy (effect sizes 0.41 and 0.42). Neither showed any effect on memory or executive function. On fitness, the high-dose group improved on the Timed Stand Test (p<0.001), while the Chair Stand Test improved in all three groups, placebo included — as did depression scores, which the authors attribute to the experience of taking part in a trial rather than to the capsule. In a subset of 15 participants per group, proteomic analysis found reduced expression of proteins in immune and HDL-assembly pathways. Systolic blood pressure rose more on the high dose than on the low dose (p=0.024), a result the paper reports without explaining.

In the discussion, the authors write that their proteomic results suggest the supplement mimics many of the effects of the Mediterranean diet. The sentence carries its conditions with it: taken over a longer period, they say, it may produce similar benefits, and establishing that requires further study.

Whether any of this changes how a woman in her fifties feels at four in the afternoon is a separate question, and neither trial was designed to answer it. The intake gap the trials were built around is better established. The UK National Diet and Nutrition Survey rolling programme for 2008 to 2014, analysed in the European Journal of Nutrition in 2019, put mean total (poly)phenol intake at about 1,035mg a day among adults aged 65 and over, with non-alcoholic beverages — largely tea and coffee — as the main source rather than a varied range of plant foods.

A supplement covering all four colour groups does not replace a good diet. The case for it rests on that intake gap, and possibly on a second one. Most polyphenols are poorly absorbed in the small intestine and depend on gut bacteria to convert them into the smaller compounds that reach the bloodstream, and the ageing gut carries fewer of the microbes that do that work. Reviews of this literature describe the mechanism as plausible and the human evidence as inconsistent, which places it among the things being investigated rather than the things established.

Living longer is one ambition. Living well — sharply, capably, energetically across the decades that matter most — is quite another.

Note to the Reader: This article has been curated by HT Syndication team. The information provided is intended solely for informational purposes and does not constitute medical advice or endorsement. Please consult a registered medical practitioner for personalized medical advice or before making any decisions regarding your health conditions or treatment options.