In an effort to help medical professionals, policy-makers, researchers, the news media and the general public evaluate the quality and usefulness of obesity research, a group of international obesity experts has formed a team that will review and evaluate published research papers in the field of obesity.
The new review body, known as the Collaborative Obesity Research Evaluation Team, or CORET, represents a collaborative effort between the University of California, Davis, and the Nutrition Institute NUTRIM at the Universiteit Maastricht in the Netherlands.
"There's a growing public realization that obesity is a killer disease," said Judith Stern, a UC Davis nutrition professor and obesity expert, who is co-chairing the project with George Bray of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center at Louisiana State University. Wim H.M. Saris will lead the effort at the University of Maastricht.
"Everyone -- moms making dinner, chefs choosing ingredients, reporters writing articles about obesity and policy makers writing laws -- wants to do the right thing, but there are many food myths, and it is almost impossible even for trained scientists to decipher just what the research is telling us," Stern said. "Our team is applying the rules of scientific method to evaluate individual published research papers."
The team's first goal is to establish criteria for evaluating scientific research papers. After that, the group will review research papers published in the scientific literature and post those reviews online. To visit the CORET Web site, go to http://nutrition.ucdavis.edu and click on the link to Collaborative Obesity Research Evaluation Team or go directly to http://coret.ucdavis.edu.
The review team's initial goal is to publish individual reviews on some 200 research papers over the next several months, releasing their findings as the papers are reviewed.