Table 1 Suggested additional reporting guidelines for individual food substitution studies and meta-analyses of food substitution studies

Individual food substitution studies:

• Aim: define your target food substitution, preferably described as a target intervention

• Methods: describe and provide a rationale for the adjustment strategy in accordance with your target food substitution and explain the interpretation of different models, for instance, if the models are with and without adjustment for other foods not part of the substitutions explored

• Results: report results from food substitution models using an all-components model, including their individual estimates, their variances and their co-variances to enable later meta-analyses

Meta-analysis of food substitution studies:

• Aim: define your target food substitution. Preferably described as a target intervention.

• Methods: include considerations for how to handle different adjustment strategies across studies, if relevant, include subgroup meta-analyses of food substitution studies with different interpretations or sensitivity analyses that exclude certain studies

• Discussion: discuss the interpretation of the meta-analysed estimate of the target food substitution, preferably in relation to the target intervention, and take the interpretation of the meta-analysed estimate into account when formulating the conclusion