The second meeting of the Dietary Guidelines Expert Committee (Expert Committee) was held in March 2022 by videoconference. The focus of the meeting was to progress the prioritisation of topics for the review of the 2013 Australian Dietary Guidelines (2013 Guidelines) and refine the strategy for evaluating the evidence.
Prioritisation of review topics
The Expert Committee considered the result of out of session deliberations in relation to the prioritisation of review topics and finalisation of scope. Members considered different factors that may influence the prioritisation of topics, including resource availability, and the challenges in forming defined research questions that span broad topic areas.
The Expert Committee discussed approaches to considering topic areas that are underpinned by social and behavioural factors and agreed on the importance of these topics to the revised guidelines.
Members identified the need to refine topic areas and consider topics with overlapping or similar issues together.
Members briefly discussed approaches for handling topics which may not be prioritised for review and considered whether additional scoping would be beneficial to determine areas where high-quality systematic reviews may have recently been published.
The Expert Committee agreed that further work to refine topic areas should be completed prior to finalising the scope of the review and developing research questions. Members agreed to undertake further work on topic prioritisation out of session.
Next steps
Topics prioritised for review and the rationale for prioritisation will be communicated to stakeholders and published on the NHMRC website. The evidence review strategy will also be communicated to stakeholders once finalised.
The Expert Committee agreed to develop research questions for each of the prioritised topics, articulating the relevant population, intervention, comparator and health outcomes of interest. Additional expertise may be sought for topics outside members' areas of expertise.
The research questions will inform the evidence review that will be undertaken by external reviewers. Suitable evidence and methodological reviewers will be engaged through an open approach to market.
Members also noted that commissioned systematic reviews will be supported by a public call for scientific evidence relevant to the research questions.
Next meeting
The next meeting of the Expert Committee will be scheduled for mid-2022.
