If you need to contact ATP about anything related to CHARM, here’s how you can get in touch with us:

Email us: tomorrow@cancercarealberta.ca

Call us (toll free): 1-877-919-9292

Call Centre hours are Monday to Friday, 8:30am – 4:00pm MST

• If your question is not urgent, we encourage you to email us and we’ll respond to you as soon as we can.
• If you need to reach us right away – for example, you need to contact us the morning of your appointment – we encourage you to call us.  We will be monitoring the call centre number.

CHARM stands for CHARacterizing heterogeneity in dietary intake among structurally excluded populations using Multidimensional data (now you can see why we abbreviate it!). The goal of the CHARM study is to better understand how diet influences our biology and long-term health, including cancer outcomes.  To do this, we will be inviting select participants who have already started the HEAL study to come visit us in the Arthur Child Comprehensive Cancer Centre to provide a fasting blood and optional stool sample.  CHARM will advance research toward more personalized approaches to cancer prevention and health promotion.

You are being invited to take part in CHARM because you are already a participant in Alberta’s Tomorrow Project (ATP) and the HEAL study. CHARM will build on this work by helping us better understand how diet and metabolic health are connected. CHARM will help researchers understand how diet and metabolism affect long‑term health, including cancer risk. By providing blood and stool samples, you help us study how nutrients, food additives, and the gut microbiome influence early biological changes in the body.

The CHARM study launched in May 2026.  Participants will be invited to participate on a rolling basis through the rest of 2026.  Analysis of the blood and stool samples provided will occur from 2027-2029.

We are aiming for 2000 participants to take part. CHARM aims to include people from a wide range of communities and backgrounds, including groups that have been historically underrepresented in health and may face barriers to equal access and opportunities based on race, ethnicity, income, education, gender, or food security.

You will be asked to provide a fasted blood sample at our study centre in Calgary within two weeks of completing an ASA24 (past 24-hour diet recall) survey for HEAL.

You will also have the option to provide a stool sample. If you choose to do so, you’ll receive a collection kit at your blood draw appointment to take home, collect the sample, and mail it back using a prepaid envelope.

Your blood can tell us a lot about your health.  By looking at things like cholesterol and blood sugar, researchers can learn how what you eat and how individual characteristics, such as your gender, may affect your health.  Blood samples allow researchers to look at thousands of small molecules (called metabolites) that reflect what you eat and how your body uses food; for instance, two people can eat a banana, but the way their bodies processes that banana may be different depending on their age, health conditions, and what else they’ve eaten that day.

In short, your blood sample gives researchers the “inside story” of how food and health are connected – something we can’t see from questionnaires themselves.

We ask for your blood samples within two weeks of your 24-hour dietary questionnaire because researchers want to be able to connect what you’ve recently eaten with what they see in your blood. Food leaves “signals” – things like glucose, cholesterol, fatty acids, and other compounds – in your blood that don’t last very long. Collecting samples soon after your dietary recall helps researchers see the clearest picture of how what you eat can be linked to your health.

Your sample will be:

1. Tested in a lab for health markers like total cholesterol, low-density lipoprotein (LDL; often referred to as “bad”) cholesterol, high-density lipoprotein (HDL; often referred to as“good”) cholesterol, triglycerides and glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c; average blood sugar);
2. Tested to measure tiny molecules that give us a detailed picture of how what we eat can affect the body (metabolomics); and,
3. stored for future research approved by an ethics board.

The blood samples will be tested for measurement of markers of metabolic health, including cholesterol and HbA1c for blood sugar.  If you would like to receive these results, we will provide them to you in the ATP Participant Portal.

Your results will be shared with you through the secure ATP Participant Portal once they are available.  Please note that the samples won’t be analyzed until collections have been completed from all participants in the study, so you may not receive results until well into 2027 at the earliest.

Collecting a blood sample in the fasted state (i.e. when you have not eaten or drank anything other than water for 8 or more hours) is useful because it gives a clearer, more accurate picture of your baseline health.  When you haven’t eaten for several hours, your body isn’t influenced by recent meals, so measurements like blood sugar, cholesterol, and triglycerides reflect your usual levels rather than short‑term changes from food. This helps researchers compare results across participants and better understand long‑term patterns related to chronic disease and overall health.

The optional stool sample helps researchers study the gut microbiome, the community of bacteria and other microorganisms that line in your digestive system. Stool samples will help us understand how bacteria in the gut microbiome are shaped by diet and food components, and how these components together impact risk of diseases like .

UPFront is a related sub-study of CHARM called the Ultra-Processed Foods and Cancer: Advancing Evidence on the Biological Mechanisms Linking the Gut Microbiome, Ultra-Processed Foods and Cancer (UPFront) study. UPFront builds on the existing HEAL and CHARM studies by using data collected through HEAL surveys and stool samples collected through CHARM. The study aims to better understand how additives found in ultra-processed foods (UPFs) may affect the gut microbiome and how UPFs could contribute to the development of colorectal cancer.

The CHARM study only requires one in person appointment for the fasting blood draw and an optional at home stool sample collection kit.

If you decide to participate in this study, you will be required to travel to the study centre located at the Arthur J.E. Child Comprehensive Cancer Centre in Calgary, AB. Parking costs will be covered by ATP but no other costs will be covered (e.g., fuel, transportation costs). One hour of paid parking will be provided for the study centre and the costs to return your stool sample (if applicable) by mail will be paid for.

Participants will be invited to start the study at different times over the course of a year.  We are aiming for 2000 participants to take part, so not everyone will be invited. We are focused on inviting those people living in and around Calgary due to the requirement to come in person to the study centre.

Summaries of the study’s results will be shared by ATP, the other regional cohorts in CanPath, and CanPath through their websites, newsletters, publications, presentations, and social media.

For safety reasons, there are some eligibility requirements for the CHARM study. Certain criteria are in place out of an abundance of caution to protect participants and ensure that all samples can be safely collected, processed, and stored.  Our CHARM study centre is located in Calgary, Alberta.  Invitees will reside in Calgary and the surrounding area only.  Other inclusion and exclusion criteria are outlined in the CHARM consent form.