Healthy Aging at Vitafoods Asia 2026: A Broader Role for Probiotics

Healthy Aging Is More Than a Single Health Concern

When developing products for older adults, it is natural to begin with a specific need.

Bone health has its own solutions. Muscle strength and physical performance have theirs. Cognitive health is often approached as another separate category.

All of these needs remain important.

But Healthy Aging itself is difficult to define through any single function.

As we age, staying healthy is not simply about maintaining one physiological measure. It is about continuing to move comfortably, maintaining strength and physical capacity, supporting bone and metabolic health, and preserving cognitive function and quality of life.

This was one of the most interesting shifts we observed at Vitafoods Asia: Health needs that were once discussed separately are increasingly being viewed as interconnected parts of Healthy Aging.

This is why we believe multi-domain will become an increasingly relevant way to think about Healthy Aging.

Multi-domain does not simply mean adding more functions to a product. It means looking at aging more holistically and recognizing that different aspects of health are closely connected throughout the aging process.

As Healthy Aging Becomes Multi-domain, How Are Products Responding?

As the concept evolves, product development is evolving with it.

At Vitafoods Asia, we observed a number of probiotic solutions approaching Healthy Aging by combining ingredients or strains associated with different individual needs.

A strain or ingredient may be selected for muscle health, another for cognition or metabolism, and these components are then brought together in a multi-strain or multi-ingredient formulation. This was one of the product development approaches visible at the show.

It is an intuitive approach: Different health needs → different solutions → one combined Healthy Aging formula.

_{A common Healthy Aging product-development logic}

But it also led us to another question.

If Healthy Aging is inherently multi-domain, could we explore multiple Healthy Aging domains starting from the same probiotic strain, rather than only combining separate single-function solutions?

This is the perspective behind New Bellus NB^® 23.

From Combining Functions to Building a Multi-domain Platform

For product developers, the growing Healthy Aging conversation opens up an interesting opportunity.

Rather than treating muscle health, metabolism, bone health and cognition as completely separate product categories, Healthy Aging gives us a framework to think about how these needs come together across the aging journey.

That does not mean every Healthy Aging product needs to address everything at once.

Instead, it creates an opportunity to ask a different question: Can one scientific platform support product development across multiple Healthy Aging domains?

For New Bellus, this is an important part of how we approach NB23.

New Bellus NB^® 23: Exploring Multi-domain Healthy Aging from One Strain

NB23 is New Bellus’ probiotic developed for Healthy Aging.

Rather than selecting different strains to represent different Healthy Aging needs and then combining them into one formulation, we have taken a different approach:

Starting with one strain and progressively building scientific evidence across multiple Healthy Aging domains.

The NB23 research program currently extends across areas including muscle and physical performance, metabolism, bone health and cognition, supported by clinical research, international journal publication, and patents in Taiwan and Japan.

For us, the goal is not simply to associate one strain with “many benefits.”

It comes back to the nature of Healthy Aging itself.

Aging well has never depended on just one physiological system.

Mobility involves more than muscle alone. Maintaining an active lifestyle is also connected with bone and metabolic health, while cognitive health remains an important part of quality of life as we grow older.

This is why we see NB23 through a multi-domain lens: starting with one strain, exploring different dimensions of Healthy Aging, and continuing to build the scientific evidence behind each of them.

A Direction We Continue to Explore

Vitafoods Asia is valuable to us not only because it introduces new ingredients and products, but because it gives us an opportunity to see which conversations are becoming more important across the industry.

This year, Healthy Aging was clearly one of those conversations.

NB23 is already on the market, but our scientific exploration of the strain continues.

We are continuing to strengthen the evidence behind NB23 across different Healthy Aging domains and to better understand how one probiotic strain may relate to multiple aspects of healthy aging.

Seeing probiotics expand beyond the familiar areas of gut and immune health into muscle health, mobility, metabolism, cognition and other Healthy Aging topics at Vitafoods Asia reinforced the relevance of this direction for us.

For New Bellus, the goal is not simply for NB23 to follow a Healthy Aging trend.

It is to continue building the science behind it.

Starting from the evidence already established, we will continue adding to the scientific picture across different domains and deepening our understanding of the relationship between a single probiotic strain and Healthy Aging.

One strain, multiple domains of Healthy Aging.

And there is still more to explore.