Evidence Collection and Evaluation for the Development of Dietary Guidelines and Public Policy on Nutrition

Dietary guidelines and recommendations, usually developed by government bodies or large authoritative organizations, have major downstream effects on public policy. A growing body of evidence supports the notion that there are serious deficiencies in the methods used to develop dietary guidelines. Such deficiencies include the failure to access or conduct comprehensive systematic reviews, a lack of systematic or rigorous evaluation of the quality of the evidence, a failure to acknowledge the limitations of the evidence base underlying recommendations, and insufficiently stringent management of conflicts of interest. These issues may be addressed by adhering to international standards for guideline development, including adopting systematic review methodology and using rigorous systems to evaluate the certainty of the evidence and to move from evidence to recommendations, of which the GRADE approach (Grading of Recommendations Assessment,Development and Evaluation) is the most rigorous and fully developed. Improving the methods by which dietary guidelines are produced has considerable potential to substantially improve public policy decision-making.