by Jack Norris, Registered Dietitian
I recently updated Choline. Although it took me dozens of hours to review the research, the take-home message is simply that vegans should choose numerous high-choline foods each day; this is especially true if you’re planning a pregnancy.
I also want to alert Vegan Health readers that we’ve set criteria for excluding research from the site. To quote the introduction to How we evaluate research, our short article on the new criteria:
In the past, articles on this site attempted to exhaustively review all the research on a subject. But the volume of observational nutrition research has grown far beyond what any small team can review — new cohort analyses, case-control studies, and meta-analyses are published at a rapidly increasing rate, across a huge and ever-expanding range of nutrient-disease pairings — and attempting to track and weigh all of it isn’t realistic. More importantly, though, most individual observational findings simply don’t deserve much weight in the first place. A statistically significant association is not the same as a causal one, and modest effect sizes — the kind that make up the large majority of published nutrition findings — are especially prone to confounding, reverse causation, and other biases that no amount of statistical adjustment fully resolves.
There’s also a benefit to you, the reader, that’s easy to overlook: when we don’t apply strong criteria up front, the alternative isn’t a cleaner article — it’s a longer one, where every marginal, often contradictory finding gets its own paragraph of caveats so you can weigh it yourself. Filtering first means we can tell you what the evidence shows without walking you through a dozen small, conflicting studies that wouldn’t have changed the answer either way.
If you’d like to read more about our criteria, or see them applied for the first time, check out How we evaluate research and Choline.
