Adherence to National Food Guide Recommendations: Can It Slow the Obesity Epidemic? A Systematic Review

Dietary guidelines (DG) have the objective to promote healthy diet and prevent chronic diseases. In order to evaluate if this purpose is being achieved, we systematically reviewed studies that associated adherence to DG with obesity.

We identified 2012 articles published in the last 5 years, and 38 remained in the final sample. The majority of studies demonstrated a negative association between adherence to DG and obesity. Studies with positive or no association presented mutual characteristics, such as populations composed only by children or adolescents, and dietary intake or dietary adherence assessed through non-validated or weak methods. Adherence to DG seems to be a protective factor for obesity in adults, but this relationship is not so clear for children and adolescents. To improve the quality of dietary intake results, studies must utilize appropriate methods to answer their questions with less biased estimate of dietary intake.