Abstract
PurposeThe present work aimed to delineate (i) a revised protocol according to recent methodological developments in evidence generation, to (ii) describe its interpretation, the assessment of the overall certainty of evidence and to (iii) outline an Evidence to Decision framework for deriving an evidence-based guideline on quantitative and qualitative aspects of dietary protein intake.MethodsA methodological protocol to systematically investigate the association between dietary protein intake and several health outcomes and for deriving dietary protein intake recommendations for the primary prevention of various non-communicable diseases in the general adult population was developed.ResultsThe developed methodological protocol relies on umbrella reviews including systematic reviews with or without meta-analyses. Systematic literature searches in three databases will be performed for each health-related outcome. The methodological quality of all selected systematic reviews will be evaluated using a modified version of AMSTAR 2, and the outcome-specific certainty of evidence for systematic reviews with or without meta-analysis will be assessed with NutriGrade. The general outline of the Evidence to Decision framework foresees that recommendations in the derived guideline will be given based on the overall certainty of evidence as well as on additional criteria such as sustainability.ConclusionThe methodological protocol permits a systematic evaluation of published systematic reviews on dietary protein intake and its association with selected health-related outcomes. An Evidence to Decision framework will be the basis for the overall conclusions and the resulting recommendations for dietary protein intake.
Highlights
Nutrition research has primarily focused on the health impact of dietary carbohydrates and dietary fats
The key question to be addressed in this guideline to assess the overall certainty of evidence was defined as follows: Does dietary protein intake with regard to quantitative and qualitative considerations affect the development of selected health-related outcomes in the general adult population? For addressing this research question, this publication describes in detail the novel methodological procedures of the literature reviews for the assessment of the overall certainty of evidence
Like the previous approaches to derive the guidelines of the DGE [7], a multi-step scheme consisting of nine steps constitutes the backbone for the methodological procedures
Summary
Nutrition research has primarily focused on the health impact of dietary carbohydrates and dietary fats. Previous guidelines developed by the German Nutrition Society (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Ernährung, DGE) addressed health-related recommendations for the consumption of dietary fat [1, 2] and dietary carbohydrates. Upon starting the development process for the evidence-based guideline on dietary protein intake, the existing methodology applied for the previous guidelines of the DGE had to be adapted to recent developments in the field. These novel aspects relate to the availability of topical evidence evaluation tools and the increased availability of systematic reviews (SRs) with or without meta-analyses (MA).
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