I am afraid the article does not say who financed this limited study – I have access to this journal and it is a pre-press submitted article which has not been formatted yet.
Stephen J. Bailey1, Paul Winyard1, Anni Vanhatalo2, Jamie R. Blackwell1, Fred J. DiMenna1, Daryl P. Wilkerson2, Joanna Tarr1, Nigel Benjamin3, and Andrew M. Jones1* Dietary nitrate supplementation reduces the O2 cost of low-intensity exercise and enhances tolerance to high-intensity exercise in humans
I can't find who gave the grant on their website?
This study follows research by Barts and the London School of Medicine and the Peninsula Medical School (published in February 2008 in the American Heart Association journal Hypertension), which found that beetroot juice reduces blood pressure.
http://hyper.ahajournals.org/cgi/reprint/51/3/784.pdf relates to the previous article:
Andrew J. Webb, Nakul Patel, Stavros Loukogeorgakis, Mike Okorie, Zainab Aboud, Shivani Misra, Rahim Rashid, Philip Miall, John Deanfield, Nigel Benjamin, Raymond MacAllister, Adrian J. Hobbs, and Amrita Ahluwalia Acute Blood Pressure Lowering, Vasoprotective, and Antiplatelet Properties of Dietary Nitrate via Bioconversion to Nitrite
Hypertension, Mar 2008; 51: 784 – 790.
Which was funded: A.J.H. is supported by a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellowship. M.O. is supported by a British Heart Foundation PhD Studentship.