International obesity experts form a team to review and evaluate obesity

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.

In addition to Stern, Bray and Saris, the initial team members are David Allison of the University of Alabama at Birmingham; Myles Faith of the University of Pennsylvania; Susan Jebb of the MRC Human Nutrition Research in Cambridge, England; Ross Pierce of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration; and Stephan Rössner of the Huddinge University Hospital, Karolinska Institute, Sweden.

"We've been lucky enough to get some of the best and most independent minds to work on the project," said co-chair George Bray. "All of us have committed to keeping the work unbiased and have agreed to abide by the rules we set out in our project's Terms of Reference, published on the CORET Web site. The scientists and the funders have pledged that no outside influence, review or other interference with the process shall be attempted or tolerated."

The CORET team expects to add two more expert panels, consisting of approximately 20 scientists, to the project.

Funding for this project has been provided through an unrestricted gift from a consortium of food-industry companies represented by an industry science panel and administered through the Grocery Manufacturers of America and the Confederation of European Union Food and Drink Industries (CIAA).