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
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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