Kevin Whelan

Fantastic start to my sabbatical in Melbourne! Here visiting @MonashSTM and @MonashNutrition with two stellar academics @hmstaudacher and @JaneaneDart Plus nice photo of Sir John Monash in the background! Excited for the next 3 months of learning and collaboration

Gluten-free food availability in 🇬🇧 remained limited and more costly than a decade ago ✅ Gluten-free foods are not widely available in the supermarkets ✅ Gluten-free foods continue to be more expensive than their standard counterparts, often exceeding inflation, although the gap has declined over time ✅ These disparities may disproportionately impact individuals from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, as well as elderly, disabled, or less mobile populations 📚New finings from @ProfWhelan & collesgues in @JHND_Official

Such a pleasure to learn from @ProfWhelan who was visiting us @SinaiHealth to talk about the state of IBD research and nutritional intake. Thanks Kevin for sitting in on our lab meeting to hear what we are working on. Thanks also for teaching us about the challenge of controls in diet studies - pick the least bad option. Good lesson. But grant and paper reviewers seem way more critical of diet studies compared with pharmaceutical intervention studies. Challenge of controls in dietary research: 1. Tolerability, nutrient intake, food-related QoL: People have to eat something, ideally that is feasible, nutritious and enjoyable 2. Dietary collinearity: Changing intake of one component changes the intake of many others. Ideally a control should be identical to the intervention, except for the one component of interest (emulsifiers) 3. Placebo and blinding: Double-blinding of participants and researchers is a gold-standard 4. Comparators (not controls): An active intervention, that has physiological effects beyond placebo, is not a control group it is a comparator group