The lip-stick shaped product boasts it delivers 100 per cent of recommended daily intakes for vitamins A, B1, B2, B3, and B5 with eight puffs of the Le Whif inhaler, first used to deliver coffee and chocolate extracts. Other potentials include hamburgers and lobsters.
The vitamins come in a highly ground aerosol form and are mixed with teas to add flavour, with a three-day supply retailing at €5.70 (£4.99).
Le Whif, manufactured Breathable Foods has been launched in the UK and other European debuts are planned, along with North America.
There are three varieties: green tea with vitamins C and E; hibiscus tea with a multivitamin; and wine tea, which delivers vitamin D and 20 milligrams of resveratrol.
ArtScience posits the idea that because the vitamins are inhaled they miss the digestive system and therefore are capable of delivering a more efficacious dose via the respiratory system.
Inhalability
ArtScience Labs is the brainchild of Harvard University professor in biomedical engineering, David Edwards, and inhalable vitamins are not his group’s foray into inhalability.
It also offers inhalable chocolate, coffee, and insulin that has drawn the interest of the diabetic community.
The idea of inhalability was born in 2007 when Edwards challenged his students to develop ways of inhaling food.
“They took a whiff of everything from pepper to carrots and coughed a lot,” Edwards said in Popular Science magazine.
Mist
There are other products that are not in pill, soft gel, liquid or tablet form but are ingested orally such as a US product called Vitamist.
That product dispenses multivitamin, antioxidants, vitamin B12, vitamin C and zinc, colloidal minerals and other nutrients and costs about €20 for a 30-day supply.
Popular Science said the process that allowed the powder to be fine enough to enter the lungs involved a drug called BCG that dehydrated food stuffs and reduced the remainder to a micro-fine powder.
The process was developed by another Edwards group, the non-profit organization, MEND (Medicine in Need), in developing tuberculosis inhalers.