Dietary and nutritional advice is notoriously fraught with misinformation and unreliable findings. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) attempts to offer clarity with a new tool, described in a set of papers published today (October 10) in Nature Medicine. The approach employs a 5-star rating system to categorize how much evidence exists for a given risk factor-health outcome correlation. The higher the star rating, the more scientific evidence exists that there is a correlation between a risk factor (smoking, for example) and a health outcome (heart disease).
The set of papers includes a methodology paper and four “proof-of-concept” studies in which scientists tested the tool’s validity on the effects of smoking, blood pressure, consuming unprocessed meat, and consuming vegetables. In the four studies, IHME scientists found strong correlations between consumption of non-starchy vegetables and better health: The vegetables correlated to decreased risk of ischemic stroke (3 stars) and ...
