Application of the Evidence Review Cycle Model to Review Food and Health Evidence to Inform Canadian Dietary Guidance Decision‐Making
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canada's population‐level dietary guidance policies and education tools are used by health professionals, policy makers and academics to support nutrition policies, programs and research. While Health Canada has always reviewed the evidence base, the growing volume of nutrition related research stimulated Health Canada to develop the Evidence Review Cycle (ERC) for dietary guidance, a model that formalizes the evidence review process. A Health Canada review of reports on food topics in relation to nutrition‐related chronic diseases and conditions will be described to illustrate the implementation of the ERC model in Canada to support decision‐making for dietary guidance policy. Reports published between 2006 and July 2015 by leading scientific organizations or Federal agencies, as well as health claims assessments from Health Canada, were reviewed. Reports were included if the organization involved an expert committee, systematically reviewed evidence and an evidence grade supported the conclusions. Excluded conclusions were specific to populations less than 2 years of age or pregnant, were not original to the report or were commissioned by industry. A total of 693 conclusions were retained from 28 reports and 58 of these conclusions were graded as convincing (strong), which included those related to sodium and increased risk of high blood pressure, trans fatty acids and increased risk for cardiovascular disease, and dietary patterns—characterized by higher consumption of vegetables, fruits, whole grains, low‐fat dairy, and seafood, and lower consumption of red and processed meats, and lower intakes of refined grains, and sugar‐sweetened foods and beverages—and positive cardiovascular disease outcomes. Convincing evidence was also found on the relationships for isocaloric replacement of saturated fatty acids and cardiovascular disease outcomes, red and processed meat and colorectal cancer, and soy protein and lowered blood cholesterol. Food and health relationships are one important input in the broad range of considerations that assist Health Canada in developing population‐level dietary guidance. Guidance is also informed by evidence on stakeholder and Canadians use dietary guidance and by national‐level data on what Canadians are eating.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.402 | 0.517 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.028 | 0.028 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.011 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; the direct Gemma label and the distilled Codex classifier agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".