To celebrate International Clinical Trials Day on May 20, visitors to the Andrew Love Cancer Centre (ALCC) had the opportunity to be part of a randomised controlled trial to see if taste has to be sacrificed for calories.
ALCC researchers got busy baking as part of their trial, making a variety of high fat and low fat cakes so trial participants could mark the flavor out of 10, without knowing whether their cake was low fat or not. The results were announced at lunchtime and… (drumroll please) low fat is better! Fifty participants rated low fat cakes as tasting better than high fat!
ALCC project officer Dr Violet Mukaro said she was overwhelmed by the response to the event.
“We flipped a coin to decide the treatment arm (high or low fat cakes) for participants. It was a wonderful opportunity to engage the public on the importance of clinical trials within the centre - we have enrolled more than 460 patients onto clinical trials and have conducted in excess of 200 trials since 2010,” she said.
Around the world International Clinical Trials Day is celebrated to raise awareness of the importance of clinical trials and research in healthcare.
