By Eric Rumsey, Janna Lawrence and Xiaomei Gu

Searching for nutrition topics in PubMed is tricky. It’s especially difficult to search for plant-based foods (PBF’s). In 2014, we published an article that addresses this problem that contained a hedge for searching for PBF’s. A few months ago, the National Library of Medicine introduced a new explosion that makes it a lot easier to search for nutrition topics in PubMed, which we discussed here.

In this article we are revising our PBF hedge to incorporate the new PubMed explosion. While there may still be a few occasions when our previous hedge for PBF’s would be appropriate, in almost all cases we do not recommend using the old hedge. Instead, we recommend using the hedge below:

((Plants[mesh] OR Plant Preparations[mesh]) AND Diet, Food, and Nutrition [mesh]) OR (Vegetables[mesh] OR Fruit[mesh] OR Plants, Edible [mh:noexp] OR Dietary Fiber[mesh] OR Flour[mesh] OR Bread[mesh] OR Diet, Vegetarian[mesh] OR Nuts[mesh] OR Condiments[mesh] OR Vegetable Proteins[mesh] OR Tea[mesh] OR Coffee[mesh] OR Wine[mesh] OR Vegetable Products[mesh])

The big change in this PBF hedge from the previous PBF hedge is, of course, replacing the food-diet-nutrition hedge that was part of the previous PBF hedge with the the new Diet, Food, and Nutrition explosion. Otherwise, the main change is the addition of the new MeSH term Vegetable Products.