Yes, and I'll refer to the slide.
Of course, I also get passionate about the opportunity for pulses in addressing health and nutrition issues. Whether we're talking about Canadian communities or whether we're talking internationally, diabetes and cardiovascular disease are two of our largest health care costs in Canada. They're two of the four United Nations priorities for non-communicable diseases.
The research funding that was announced, which is being spent at the University of Toronto, the University of Guelph, at the Richardson Centre in Manitoba, at CIGI, is really to further our knowledge. We're actually in the process of pursuing health claims for lentils and blood sugar control—this would be the first blood sugar control health claim on any food product in North America—and also for beans in relation to cardiovascular disease. We want to expand that to other pulses.
I think what we are also trying to do in this research is identify what the specific compounds in pulse crops are that are giving this cardio-protective effect. That circles right back to the very beginning of saying plant breeding.... Do we now have something we have identified that's of value, that's important to consumers, not to farmers alone but to consumers as well? This becomes the whole value chain of understanding what is of value at the consumer level, and then bringing that as a signal back to the plant breeding activity.
I think it's an example where I would say yes, this is the role the government can play. It is to foster innovative research, and then also to see where that research can play back down the supply chain to the production level.