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[March, 2016 – With NLM’s recent introduction of an inclusive diet, food and nutrition explosion, in most cases we recommend using the new explosion instead of the hedge described below. Please see our article on the new explosion.]

By Eric Rumsey and Janna Lawrence

As discussed in a previous article, searching for Food, Diet, and Nutrition in PubMed is tricky because the relevant Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) for the subject are scattered widely in the classification scheme. To do a thorough search, therefore, it’s necessary to use a number of terms. To make this easier, we have created a search strategy, or hedge, that combines most of the Food-Diet-Nutrition terms in one search. The hedge search, of course, is much too large to be useful by itself (it gets over 1.5 million citations in PubMed). So it’s intended to be combined with another subject. A typical example would be finding the nutritional aspects of a disease. Here is the hedge:

food OR foods OR beverages OR diet OR dietary OR vitamin OR vitamins OR nutrition OR nutritional OR nutrition disorders OR food industry OR nutritional physiological phenomena OR dietary fats OR dietary proteins OR feeding behavior

To use this search, click this link. You can also copy the text above and paste it into the PubMed search box. If you have a personal “My NCBI” account in PubMed, the hedge search can be saved for later use, or it can be made into a search filter. For information on setting up and using saved searches, see here; for more information on filters, see here.

List of terms in the hedge (below). Terms on the list that have no accompanying text are searched only as text-words (words appearing in article titles or abstracts), and as words that are part of MeSH terms.Terms below that are found in MeSH (which are also automatically searched as text-words) have brief commentary.

• Food – MeSH term Food is a very large explosion (Learn more about explosions)
• Foods
• Beverages – MeSH term Beverages is a large explosion
• Diet – MeSH term Diet is a large explosion
• Dietary
• Vitamin
• Vitamins – Vitamins is a MeSH term and explosion, although the only specific vitamin included in its explosion is Vitamin B Complex. Many vitamins do have the word “vitamin” in their MeSH term, so they are picked up by the word “vitamin” above.
• Nutrition
• Nutritional
• Nutrition disorders – MeSH term Nutrition disorders is a large explosion
• Food industry – MeSH term Food industry is a large explosion
• Nutritional Physiological Phenomena – MeSH term Nutritional Physiological Phenomena is a large explosion
• Dietary Fats – MeSH term Dietary Fats is a medium explosion
• Dietary Proteins – MeSH term Dietary Proteins is a medium explosion
• Feeding behavior – Most of the terms in the Feeding Behavior explosion are picked up by other search words in the hedge linked above. But the MeSH term itself picks up a few unique, useful citations.

Disclaimer: This hedge is not ALL-inclusive for Food-Diet-Nutrition. As complicated as the subject is, it’s not possible to include all of the relevant terms in one search. This is especially the case because most plant-based foods are not in any category that can be searched together. The Food explosion does include many specific foods, but most plant-based foods are only in the Plants explosion, and not in the Food explosion. For tips on searching for plant-based foods, see here.

This article has been superseded by the following:
Diet, Food, and Nutrition – How To Search in PubMed

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By Eric Rumsey and Janna Lawrence

Much of the power of PubMed searching is due to the elegant Medical Subject Heading [MeSH] system used to index articles. When you type words into the PubMed search box, it looks for the most appropriate MeSH terms to use for your topic. When PubMed searches those MeSH terms, it also searches for closely related terms that are narrower in scope. This is especially useful because it makes it easy to search for broad categories of subjects. Search for cancer, for instance, and you’ll get every type of cancer, from leukemia to melanoma, whether the actual word cancer is used or not. The MeSH system works well for most all subjects in PubMed. A glaring exception, however, is food and nutrition. Unlike most other subjects, to do a comprehensive food and nutrition search, it’s necessary to search for at least four different concepts:

• Food and Beverages (a MeSH term)
• Nutritional Physiological Phenomena (a MeSH term, which includes Diet as a narrower term)
• Diet Therapy (a subheading)
• Nutrition (Unlike the concepts above, this is actually not a MeSH term; it includes searching for the word nutrition as a text word, and several MeSH terms that use the word nutrition or nutritional)

Unfortunately, the articles that are indexed with terms in these clusters often do not overlap. Many articles are in only one of the clusters. Making things even more complicated, there are some aspects of the subject that are not included in any of these broad concepts. This is especially the case when searching for specific food ingredients or nutritional supplements. Here are a some examples that illustrate this — these articles are not indexed with any of the general nutritional MeSH terms mentioned above:

• Plant-derived health: the effects of turmeric and curcuminoids
• Antioxidant supplements for prevention of gastrointestinal cancers
• Aspartame ingestion and headaches: a randomized crossover trial

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Here are additional articles we’ve written on searching food, diet and nutrition in PubMed:

• Food, Diet & Nutrition – An Inclusive PubMed Search – How to do a comprehensive food and nutrition search by creating a saved search or search filter in PubMed.
• Plant-Based Foods – A Tricky PubMed Search

UI affiliates: For help with food and nutrition searching in PubMed, please contact librarians at Hardin.