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A 2025 review concluded that plant polyphenols may support healthy ageing through several biological routes, including lowering chronic inflammation, reducing oxidative stress, supporting mitochondrial function, and influencing genes linked with longevity. They may affect some of the underlying processes associated with how the body changes over time.
Vitamins taught people to think about nutrition in tidy little boxes. DailyColours, a British company focused on plant polyphenols, is making the case that the colours in food may matter just as much as the nutrients people learned to recite at school. Red, purple, green and gold are not just visual charm, the company argues. They are chemical clues, and some of them may help slow the rate of ageing.
What vitamins left out
For decades, nutrition was framed around what could be counted neatly on a chart. Vitamin C. Iron. Calcium. Magnesium. That model brought real progress, but it trained generations to look past another class of nutrients hiding in plain sight. Fruits, vegetables and herbs carry tiny plant compounds called phytonutrients, many of them polyphenols, and some of their potential benefits are linked to the pigments that make food vivid in the first place.
People already know a few of those names. Beta-carotene gives carrots their orange hue. Lycopene gives tomatoes their red. Anthocyanins paint blueberries and blackcurrants with deep blue-purple tones. Yet the wider public rarely hears that these compounds may be part of the reason colourful plant foods are associated with healthy ageing, sharper thinking and stronger resilience later in life.
Plants produce these molecules for their own survival. Colour helps defend against heat, light, insects and microbes, and when humans eat those compounds, some of that protective power may pass on. Colin Rose, development director at DailyColours, puts the idea in simple language: “The key to staying healthy may be to ensure you eat from each of these four colour groups, ideally every day.”
People do not need a degree in biochemistry to grasp the value of a plate full of reds, greens, blues and oranges. DailyColours has given that idea a name: colour nutrition.
Why polyphenols may matter more than most people realise
The deeper story begins in places that have fascinated longevity researchers for years. Sardinia and Ikaria are often cited because many people there live to advanced ages while maintaining relatively active lifestyles and good health. Food is not the only reason, but diet keeps coming back into the frame, especially the Mediterranean pattern of eating with its heavy reliance on colourful plant foods, herbs, olive products and berries.
Polyphenols are one part of that story. Nutrition sounds dry until it turns personal. One day it becomes the reason energy drops sooner than it used to. Another day it becomes the fogginess that follows poor sleep, or the frustrating sense that recovery takes longer than it should. Polyphenols matter because ageing is rarely one dramatic event. Ageing is a slow accumulation of small losses, and compounds that may help counteract some of those losses at once could be worth further attention.
The practical problem is simple. Polyphenol intake in the UK varies by age and diet, with studies suggesting that tea, coffee and other non-alcoholic beverages are among the major
That may be why the colour idea stands apart from a typical supplement pitch. Plenty of products promise to target one trendy mechanism of ageing. Colour nutrition argues that the body does not age one pathway at a time, so food-derived compounds that act across several systems may deserve a more central place in the conversation.
From a simple idea to a consumer product
DailyColours is where that argument stops being theory and starts turning into a real consumer proposition. The company spent four years building a case around the notion that the colour spectrum found in Mediterranean foods could be concentrated into a daily product without losing the breadth of compounds found in those foods. Its formula draws from 16 Mediterranean fruits, vegetables and herbs and delivers colour phytonutrients across four colour groups.
The company presents a way of thinking about nutrition that is more accessible than much of the language used in the healthy ageing market. A shopper may never remember the name of a fashionable molecule, but a shopper will remember red, blue-purple, green and orange-yellow.
Human testing adds another layer to the story. The evidence includes two university studies, first at King’s College London and then in a larger Exeter trial involving 150 adults aged 50 and over. According to the study materials, participants showed improvements in some measures of cognitive performance and physical fitness, while blood analysis indicated changes in immune and inflammation markers that were similar to patterns associated with the Mediterranean diet over time.
DailyColours is not really asking people to forget vitamins and minerals in the literal sense. It is asking them to stop treating those nutrients as the whole story. Vitamins and minerals may keep deficiency at bay, while colour compounds may help explain why whole diets rich in plant diversity may have been protecting human health all along.
Ageing can reduce how efficiently the body absorbs plant nutrients, which means the need for richer intake may grow right when eating well becomes harder to maintain. DailyColours frames itself as a way to close that gap for people who know what they should eat but do not manage the full range day after day.
That is why the next chapter in nutrition may look less like a silver capsule with a futuristic name and more like a return to something visible on the plate. Colour has always been there. DailyColours is simply arguing that science may be catching up with it.
For more information, visit DailyColours
These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.
