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Dietary Science Newsletter
IBS-carbohydrate project receives a large grant
08/01/2019
The Dietary Science Foundation has gotten wonderful news: the evaluation of the role of carbohydrates in stomach pain, IBS, has now received a total of 383,000 Euros from the Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Health Care (Forte). It means that the project will get done in the high-quality way the researchers hoped for.
The first project the Dietary Science Foundation invested in when we started out in 2014 was an evaluation of the role of carbohydrates in IBS. Around ten percent of the population has stomach pain on a daily basis, and nobody knows what causes it. In recent years researchers have begun to suspect that different kinds of high-carbohydrate foods may aggravate the pain.
The project, which is being run by Stine Størsrud and Magnus Simrén at the University of Gothenburg, is the largest study of food and IBS ever done. The researchers are comparing the effects of three different treatments: a low FODMAP diet, a strict low-carbohydrate diet, and a conventional dietary treatment in combination with medicine.
Will be able to employ more people in the project
The Dietary Science Foundation made a 600,000 SEK contribution to the study, and the researchers subsequently received 1.94 million SEK from the insurance company Skandia’s research fund. Now the Swedish Research council for Health, Working Life and Welfare, Forte, has also made a contribution. Forte’s annual open call was answered by 1,100 proposals, of which 92 projects were chosen to receive funding. One of them was the study of different dietary treatments for IBS, which received a grant of 383,000 Euros.
This large amount of extra money will enable more researchers to be employed in the study. There are many patients to be treated and more people are needed. In addition, it will be possible to do detailed analyses of how diet affects gut flora, which hopefully will give the researchers a clue as to why so many people develop IBS, and if different forms of IBS require different treatment.
The Dietary Science Foundation is pleased that one of the projects we supported has received large grants from other financiers. The project is well designed and will give us new knowledge about how to manage this growing public health problem. It is estimated that the study will be finished in 2021 at the latest.
