Want to keep up with the latest developments in nutrition research? Nothing beats curating your own information-gathering network from a variety of credible sources. But where to start? If you want to keep up with breaking nutrition research like a boss, then this podcast is for you. I’ll let you in on the key journals to subscribe to, the best search databases to use, and profile some of the best secondary sources that do a lot of the curating for you.
Nutrition is an ever-growing and developing science. And while the pace of that growth can be rapid, it is rare that a single research paper ever overturns everything that has gone before it and causes an about-face and change in direction. But as the research base grows, you’ll be well served in forming your own understanding of a field of interest by keeping abreast of developing research.
If you caught my podcast last week, I ran a masterclass on how to decipher a research paper. So, this week is all about finding and keeping up to date with that research.
The best place to start is right at the source: that is peer-reviewed journals. There are over 100 dedicated nutrition journals as well as thousands of medical and health speciality journals so it can be overwhelming. No one can hope to keep up with all journals so it pays to be strategic and go for a handful of journals that will likely have good coverage of high impact nutrition research in them. And the key here is that you don’t strive to read all that is published in those journals. You only have to scan the table of contents as each issue is published to see what is new and what grabs your attention. You can then go on to read the abstract for research that interests you, and, if it looks relevant, go on to read the full paper. Just scanning article titles and sometimes abstracts will give you a nice overview of a huge diversity of areas.
Nothing beats curating your own list of journals to subscribe to, but if you’re unsure of where to start then I suggest the following ones as being where I see the most high-impact and broad nutrition research published. And the journals are:
The American Journal of Clinical NutritionThe European Journal of Clinical NutritionAnnual Review of NutritionJournal of NutritionNutrition ReviewsObesity ReviewsSee the show notes for a link to each journal’s site where you can sign up for free to their email alert service and get notified when a new issue comes out.
Treat this list as a starting point as it can be easily expanded with additional journals that cover speciality areas of interest to you such as diabetes, eating disorders, public health nutrition and so on. You can also look back at research that has attracted your interest before and see what journal it was published in – this could be a clue that this journal may be in your domain area to keep an eye on.
I subscribe to over 20 journal eTOCs alerts which include both nutrition and medical journals. Yet spread over a month, that means between 500 and 1000 papers that I scan over at the level of the title so it is pretty quick to do when it is staggered in drips seeing as all the journals send out email alerts at different times. And from there, I probably only go on to look at the abstract of maybe 20 to 30 of the papers and from there, only a small handful again of papers that I read in full. So, hopefully, that puts your mind at ease that you don’t need to be reading every bit of research you come across and just looking over titles helps to keep your finger on the pulse of what is happening in research.
So that’s journal scanning done. Yet it only gives you a broad snapshot of the field and will miss many papers that would definitely be of interest to you. That’s where having email alerts for research published based on keyword searching is vital. You are probably already familiar with PubMed which is a free search engine for accessing primarily the MEDLINE database of references and abstracts on life sciences and biomedical topics. This is where you will find the most nutrition research published. Searching on PubMed is useful when you want to research a topic area, but it can also be useful for keeping up with breaking research in your areas of interest. The best tool to get weekly breaking research updates from PubMed is a tool called PubCrawler and I’ll link to it in the show notes. Simply sign up for a free account on PubCrawler and set your keyword search queries and how often you want to be notified. I suggest going for weekly. So, what keywords should you put in? Whatever is interesting to you but be mindful you want your weekly search results to be manageable so be prepared to modify keywords over time. And treat them as dynamic – I’m always adding and removing keywords as my interest in particular areas of nutrition waxes and wanes over the years.
Finding research of interest from journal TOC alters or through PubMed is enough to get you to the abstract, but not all of these sources will link to the full text of the article that is available for free. For here, unless you have access to a university library login then you may draw a blank at getting much further. Sometimes if you Google the title of the paper you may find a link to the full text in a repository like ResearchGate but failing that, it doesn’t hurt to email the authors directly as a contact email address will usually be given from where the paper sits on the journal website.
Reading and interpreting the paper is the next step and check out my podcast from last week where I gave you my tips and tricks on deciphering a paper.
My next tip for keeping up with research is to go to secondary sources that report on the research itself. A great news gathering site is Science Daily and for each new piece of research they profile, a concise summary is given along with links to the research. And I’ll link to the health and nutrition section on Science Daily in the show notes. www.sciencedaily.com/news/health_medicine/nutrition
Another more general medical site is Medscape.com where you can sign up for email alerts around medical speciality areas but they also have topic alerts which cover nutrition, obesity and some other areas that may be of interest.
Surprisingly, Twitter can be a great place to keep up with nutrition research by following key people who tweet out lots of good information. For this, you’ll have to do your own digging for people that are aligned with areas of interest to you, but once you find one or two, you can look at their profile to see if they’ve curated lists of people they follow in the nutrition research area so that can lead you down some good avenues. You can follow me on Twitter @CroweTim as I follow a few good people and I tweet a lot of nutrition research as well. With Twitter though, if you take the time to follow key people purely for nutrition research then I recommend putting them into a list so you can then see all the Tweets they’ve put out from each time you check Twitter which is important if you’re not on Twitter a lot. If you follow lots of people, then an individual’s tweet will get lost in the stream of flotsam and jetsam that you need to scroll through.
And my final recommendation for keeping up with nutrition research is one of the best evidence-based sites on the Internet – that’s Examine.com It’s a place I go to a lot. Examine.com is an independent website dedicated to reviewing both nutritional supplements and providing updates and digests on breaking research. All supported by a team of editors and PhD scientists with not a hint of advertising or commercial links to nutrition companies. There is loads of free information on the site, but they do have a membership subscription service for a range of digests, access to databases and personalised summaries of the most important nutrition research published in the last month. So, you can check out their service and see if it is of value for you.
And to finish off there is always your social media networks in following people who profile current research in their channels and I unashamedly put my hand up here as being one of those in what I put out on my Thinking Nutrition Facebook page and even through this podcast. Which is a nice segue into my research wrap up segment where I profile a study that has grabbed my attention during the week.
A major review has uncovered the role that diet and exercise changes can have during pregnancy in reducing excess gestational weight gain while also significantly lowering the odds of a woman needing a caesarean section.
Having excess weight at the start of a pregnancy is an issue now faced by over half of all women of childbearing age worldwide. Obesity and excessive gestational weight gain put mother and offspring at greater risk of pregnancy complications and ill health and even can affect later-life health.
The maternal risks of obesity during pregnancy include gestational diabetes and preeclampsia. Obesity in pregnancy can also affect the health later in life for both mother and child. For women, these risks include heart disease and hypertension and for children, there is a higher risk of future obesity and heart disease.
Birth complications are also of a higher concern for women who are obese. Two- to three-fold higher rates of caesarean section births are seen in women who are obese.
Intervention programs based on diet or physical activity have a potential role in preventing adverse pregnancy outcomes. How strong the benefits of such programs are has been synthesised into a major review of randomised controlled trials of direct lifestyle intervention programs in pregnancy.
Collectively, information on more than 12,500 women from 36 separate studies could be collated to look at how well diet and exercise programs fared in reducing weight gain and adverse pregnancy outcomes. And I’ll link to the study in the show notes https://www.bmj.com/content/358/bmj.j3119
The strongest benefits of lifestyle programs were seen on rates of caesarean section delivery and the risk of developing gestational diabetes. Rates of caesarean section birth fell by 10 percent. While a healthy lifestyle also reduced a woman's risk of developing diabetes during pregnancy by 24 percent.
There was a small fall in excess weight gained during pregnancy with lifestyle programs and this weight benefit was consistently observed irrespective of maternal body mass index, age, ethnicity, or pre-existing medical conditions.
With so many studies in the review, they all varied in the type of intervention used. But a common theme of a ‘healthy diet’ was one that encouraged eating more fibre, fish and olive oil, and no sugary drinks. For exercise interventions, it was stationary bike riding, swimming, dancing and toning exercises that were the cornerstone of programs.
A healthy diet and regular exercise did not appear to alter the risk of stillbirth or the baby being born underweight or overweight. The need for use of a neonatal intensive care unit also was not altered between intervention and control groups.
A strength of the analysis was that all the interventions were randomised controlled trials. A downside was that 80 percent of the women included in the analysis were white Caucasians and more than half were of a higher social class so the results may not be fully generalisable to all sections of society. The studies did not look at how the benefits seen on gestational weight gain translated into long-term benefits for mother and child.
The findings of this major review reinforce the benefits of having a healthy, active lifestyle during pregnancy. For the exercise component though, all women should speak with their healthcare professional before starting or continuing to exercise during pregnancy.
So that’s it for today’s show. You can find the show notes either in the app you’re listening to this podcast on if it supports it, or else head over to my webpage www.thinkingnutrition.com.au and click on the podcast section to find this episode to read the show notes.
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I’m Tim Crowe and you’ve been listening to Thinking Nutrition.