Study Inclusion Criteria

PlantBasedResearch.org Study Database Inclusion/Exclusion Criteria

Overall Exclusion Criteria

  • Bibliographies
  • Case reports
  • Congresses
  • Dictionaries
  • Directories
  • Duplicate publications
  • Editorials
  • Guidelines
  • Interviews
  • Lectures
  • Legal cases
  • Legislation
  • Letters
  • News or newspaper articles
  • Reviews published prior to 2005

Overall Inclusion Criteria

  • Studies published from 1900 to present day identified in OVID MEDLINE®, Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, CAB Abstracts
  • Published in English
  • Relevant to plant-based diets or comparisons between the effects of animal vs. plant-based foods
  • Study designs
    • Randomized controlled trials
    • Controlled clinical trials;
    • Other clinical trials, including random allocation, masked, or blinded; comparative studies
    • Evaluation studies
    • Reviews published in 2006 or more recently
    • Systematic reviews
    • Follow-up studies
    • Prospective studies
    • Cross-over studies
    • Case-control studies
    • Matched-pair analyses
    • Cohort studies, including longitudinal or prospective
    • Intervention studies
    • Cross sectional or prevalence studies
    • Animal studies
    • In vitro studies
    • Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs) or environmental analyses
    • Comments on published studies

Content Exclusion Criteria:

  • Comparisons of various animal-based sources of individual nutrients and health outcomes
  • Investigations of various animal-based foods/diets and health outcomes (unless there is a comparator diet with roughly 10-15% fat, 10% protein, and 75-80% carbohydrate, or a comparison made between animal-based foods and plant-based foods)
  • Narrowly focused on mechanisms of specific nutrients and whose results cannot be considered in the context of a mostly plant-food or substantially animal-food diet
  • Studies on the Meditarranean diet (there are too many and the macronutrient composition of the diet is not similar enough to whole food, plant-based)
  • Short-term studies (acute, days, weeks, or months) on the effects of supplementation

Content Inclusion Criteria:

  • Comparisons of plant-based foods and animal-based foods and health outcomes
  • Comparisons of whole foods and processed foods and health outcomes
  • Investigations of various versions of plant-based diets (very low-fat plant-based, vegan, vegetarian, and others) 
  • Comparisons of plant-based diets to diets containing substantial quantities of animal food and/or processed food
  • Investigations of mechanisms of specific nutrients and whose results may be relevant in the context of a mostly plant-food or substantially animal-food diet
  • Studies that examine patterns of health outcomes and their associations with greater plant food content and lessor plant food content
  • Investigations of diets whose nutrient profiles may be relevant to that of a whole food, plant-based diet (10% protein, 10-15% fat, 75-80% carbohydrate)
  • Long-term studies (years+) on the effects of supplementation
  • Surveys and assessments of nutrient content, dietary intake, disease status, and other cross-sectional information that may be relevant in the consideration of the the benefits of whole food, plant-based diets