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Letter from Alice: Living the Sweet Life
Did you know that about half of shoppers give their sweetheart chocolate on Valentine’s Day? Heart-shaped boxes are particularly popular, as cliche as they may seem. But many who have celiac disease or have loved ones with celiac disease know that food isn’t always the most fun gift to receive post-diagnosis. This year, why not get creative with your gift-giving? Give your friends and loved ones an infinitely more lasting gift: research for a cure.
This year, give your sweetheart the gift of science by donating to Beyond Celiac.
With your support, Beyond Celiac is catalyzing the next wave of celiac disease research. Our organization has made significant progress accelerating research for treatments and a cure thanks to our generous donors! In the last year alone, this is how we put your gifts to work:
- Funded groundbreaking research grants, positioning Beyond Celiac as the premier organization for funding international celiac disease research
- Presented original research to raise awareness in the academic community of the ubiquity of non-GI symptoms
- Hosted a science summit to brainstorm strategies for overcoming barriers to treatments and a cure
- Embarked on a health equity initiative to ensure all patients can access care and are involved in clinical trials
- Recruited for clinical trials to accelerate progress for treatments and a cure
- Published the first-ever benchmark survey for celiac disease in conjunction with Harris Poll about awareness and treatments to establish benchmarks for progress in raising awareness for celiac disease
- Added new surveys to our Go Beyond Celiac registry to collect further information from our community on their lives with celiac disease
(We also have some VERY exciting research grant news on the horizon—stay tuned!)
Wouldn’t a cure be sweet to savor? To Beyond Celiac, a cure means real treatment options so those with celiac disease can live healthy lives and eat without fear. In the future, that means something as simple as eating any chocolate you want, but also traveling anywhere you want, eating with family and friends, and getting relief after years of intense symptoms. It means a life free from the burden of hypervigilance.
We firmly believe that with our strategic approach to targeted research, an effective treatment or cure is possible by 2030. With your support, we can get there. Without your support, it could be decades before anyone invests in celiac disease. Give today and one day soon you won’t have to worry about gluten in those heart-shaped boxes. Now that’s what I call living the sweet life.
Together for a cure,
—Alice Bast
“Max’s digestive struggles began when he was a toddler. He vomited often and slept little. At some point, he started self-selecting food, realizing that fruit and the gluten-free pretzels I had bought on a whim never made him sick. He essentially subsided on that diet for months. His once chubby cheeks grew slim and narrow. Just before his third birthday, Max had dropped so much weight that he was back to wearing his one-year-old clothes.”
