Evidence-based nutritional guidelines: What is meant by trustworthy recommendations

Abstract

The article aims to describe the characteristics of trustworthy recommendations as well as standards for trustworthy guidelines published by the Institute of Medicine and tools that can be used for quality assessment. The next section summarizes published assessments of guidelines quality using AGREE (Appraisal of Guidelines, Research and Evaluation) Instrument and the problems raised by the National Academy of Sciences regarding the development process of nutritional guidelines. Similar problems are also reflected in the assessment of quality of dietary guides, since less than 50 % of the documents were rated as high quality. The article is concluded with the description of the NutriRECS protocol, as an example of a strict, transparent and comprehensive approach to draw up nutritional guidance.

Keywords

• health guidelines
• trustworthy recommendations
• nutrition
• NutriRECS
• methodological quality