For more than 10 years Dr Kiran Ahuja has plied a steady stream of volunteers with food such as chillies, chickpeas, breakfast bars, salt and tomato soup, and she's full of admiration for the dedicated people helping her team advance biomedical research.
The research fellow with the University of Tasmania's School of Human Life Sciences in Launceston is constantly looking at the relationship between what her volunteers eat and how their blood pressure reacts, often simply to find out how to control the "confounders" – the things that make blood pressure react in an unpredictable manner and therefore skew the results of experiments.
It might not sound like ground-breaking research, but Dr Ahuja is well aware of the important part her research plays in the bigger picture of heart disease and its risk factors such as hypertension (high blood pressure).
"It's about streamlining the research process," Dr Ahuja explained.
"We are working on a small part of a big problem, but it's an important part.
"I've been looking at the discrepancy between studies for results on blood pressure and how it is affected by different types of food intake since 2009."
In Dr Ahuja's chilli study, blood pressure responses were compared from when participants ate a diet containing hot chillies to when they ate a diet without hot chillies.
In the breakfast study the focus was on glycemic index and people's blood pressure response to high GI and low GI foods.
And when an increasing amount of available literature said that if you replace sodium in the diet with potassium it helped control blood pressure – well, that had to be tested, too.
The results of the sodium replacement trial will soon be published and Dr Ahuja promises that the outcome will be surprising.
"It will be a big thing for our small team of three – Prof Madeleine Ball, Dr Jeff Beckett and me, as well as our hard-working students – to be published in the leading journal in the field"
One of Dr Ahuja's biomedical science masters students, Kerlie Lee, is about to launch a study that tackles the conflicting opinions of whether the various phases of a woman's menstrual cycle affect blood pressure, especially after eating food.
It's a tall order but she is looking for women aged between 18 and 42, who have a regular menstrual cycle and have not taken any hormonal contraception for at least four months.
"We rely heavily on the generosity of the general public to help with these studies and the people of Launceston have always been wonderful supporters," Dr Ahuja said.
"Local Rotary and Lions clubs in particular are always happy to help out, and also give us the opportunity to present our results.
"We ask our volunteers to provide their time, change their eating habits, eat things like chillies or other foods, and they do it happily and show interest in what goes on here at UTAS.
"It really shows that from academics to students to the general public, everyone can be involved in scientific discoveries that really make a difference."