For the next two years, 250 people in the Winnipeg area will eat bagels, buns, muffins and pasta filled with mystery: do they contain ground flax?
Half of the consumers will receive food that contains flax, while the other half won’t.
It will be impossible for the test subjects to taste the difference, but scientists hope it will be possible to tell the difference by checking their hearts.
“Over the course of a two year follow-up, we will be able to compare the two groups of patients and look at the effect of the flax,” said Dr. Randy Guzman, a heart specialist at St. Boniface Hospital in Winnipeg.
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Guzman and other researchers at the Canadian Centre for Agri-food Research in Health and Medicine hope the $1.5 million study will find that flax products improve people’s cardiovascular health.
Researchers suspect the test subjects who eat flax will have fewer heart attacks, less angina and less incidence of arrhythmia. They also expect them to have better endurance in cardiovascular exercises.
The heart patients will receive monthly deliveries of the frozen baked goods and have agreed to eat a portion every day.
The federally-provincially funded Agricultural Research and Development Initiative is contributing $92,000 to the project, which ARDI board member George Hacking said should help build a bigger flax market.
“We really focus on what’s going to help the farmer, and this should help flax producers prove their point to consumers,” he said.
Food processors and marketers will also benefit if flax can be proven to have heart benefits.
