In late 2017 I’d been searching for a natural remedy to stop the hellish merry-go-round of winter colds that inevitably trotted back from our kids’ nursery and rampaged through our home. In May 2018, a scientist, Dr Nicholas Larkins, waxed lyrical to me about lactoferrin on the phone. He’d been taking bovine lactoferrin – microfiltered from cow’s milk and dried to a powder form – for the past 30 years and it had cut his colds off at the pass.

It sounded like snake oil. Why wasn’t it well known in the UK, I wondered? After researching on PubMed – a respected database of biomedical literature – I found thousands of papers on the benefits of lactoferrin. It’s a protein that exists within the entry points of our bodies as our immune system’s first line of defence. Supplementing with bovine lactoferrin appeared to support the immune system and reduce the occurrence of infection from viruses and bacteria.

I asked Nick if I could try some. When it arrived and I opened it, it was pale pink and so fine that it poofed into the air like icing sugar. I took a quarter teaspoon – 250mg – and it stuck itself to the roof of my mouth for minutes, just as Nick said it would. It had a slightly sweet, not-unpleasant malty taste.

My husband Ed looked at me. He’s the ultimate sensible cynic. I’d told him that this was apparently a miracle cold cure, and I fully expected him to scoff. He doesn’t indulge the superfluous – whether that’s inane gossip, a ridiculously priced designer handbag or the latest health fad. What surprised me was that he gamely decided to join me in testing out the lactoferrin.

This was May 2018, and we took it every day for 3 months. We didn’t catch any colds or bugs in that time, but hey – this was summer, right? So, we decided to only take it when we needed to. In the autumn, when we got the first cold symptoms – and we all know how those play out – we took the lactoferrin. The next day the cold seemed better; the day after the cold was gone. Seriously?? We tried it again, and again, and again. It worked. And it worked. And it worked. We felt better, the kids felt better.

The only way to convince a cynic, it turns out, is first-hand proof. Placebo is powerful, but my husband had nothing to gain. When we ran out of the raw material, he was climbing the walls for me to source more:

“I can’t get sick, I’ve got too much work on!”

No more cold cyclones ripping through our home. But where was a product that we could both take, made in the UK? I couldn’t find one. Here was an entirely natural active, that was hugely popular in the Far East and to a lesser extent in the US and the rest of Europe, but unknown in this country. I decided to make one myself.

In my next post, read about how I was compelled to start the business, despite only having ONE of the five characteristics every successful entrepreneur needs.