Glyconutrientsinfo.com

Glyconutrients are plant based sacharrides that are derived from plants such as the aloe plant, certain mushrooms and seaweed among other sources. The discovery of these eight plant based saccharides and their use as a nutritional supplement is credited to Dr. Bill McAnalley while being employed by Carrington Labs during the mid 1980s. Dr. McNalley was commissioned to find the active ingredient in the aloe plant and as a result he discovered that it was a long chain poly-sacharride called mannose. Mannose is also a saccharide that is found on the glycoprotein of the human cell’s surface.  Mannose was isolated into a nutritional supplement and began being sold on the shelf at nutritional stores around the country. In 1994, another nutritional company based in Texas, Mannatech, Inc., hired Dr. McAnalley and began looking for other plant based saccharides. In 1996, the first glyconutritional product that contained all 8 of the necessary glyconutrients was formed, Ambrotose by Mannatech. Mannatech filed for a patent in 1996 and in 2006 it was approved in the U.S. and now hold patents around the world. As of 2009, hundreds of thousands of people around the world have benefited from using Ambrotose.

Over the last 30 years there have been two new fields of research to emerge which study these sacharrides in the body: glycomics and glycobiology. Glycobiology is the “study of the structure, biosynthesis, and biology of saccharides (sugar chains or glycans) that are widely distributed in nature” according to Wikipedia.org. They define Glycomics as “the comprehensive study of glycomes (the entire complement of sugars, whether free or present in more complex molecules, of an organism), including genetic, physiologic, pathologic, and other aspects”.  The study of these sugars is considered by many to be the future of medicine and scientific research.

Mannatech has spent over 5 million dollars on research on their glyconutritional products including Ambrotose. You can review the research here.

In  2006, Mannatech released a more concentrated version of Ambrotose, called Advanced Ambrotose. It includes a fucoidins from Undaria pinnatifida (common name ‘Wakame’),a seaweed rich in fucose consumed by Asian cultures for thousands of years. Wakame contains fucose, galactose, and mannose, all of which are glyconutrients that are found in glycoproteins on the human cell’s surface.