After a several month long application and evaluation process, we finally got the news that our application to the Icelandic Scientific Ethics Committee was approved. This means that our interdisciplinary intervention study can go ahead as planned this September.
The research involves people changing their diet for a period of 10 weeks, with one group switching to a highly fermented diet consisting of various pro- and prebiotic foodstuffs that are widely available in stores or easy to make at home. Another group will get a specially prepared colostrum-based dietary supplement. Two control groups are established: one with a regular diet low in probiotics and one with a regular diet that is high in probiotics. All four groups will be tested, and the intervention groups monitored over a period of 14 weeks, with biosample analyses before and after the 10-week intervention period.
The research also involves open interviews with participants in the first group, on thoughts, feelings and attitudes towards their experience with fermented foods and human-microbial interactions in general. We are hoping that the combined laboratory, quantitative and qualitative data, will contribute to a holistic view of the effects and affects of symbiotic living, with cross-cutting and collaborative trans-disciplinary analyses that will get published in the next couple of years.