Unfair comparison

Dissimilar care

Look out for comparisons of nutrition interventions where the people in different comparison groups were cared for differently.

Sometimes the people in different intervention comparison groups were cared for differently. When this happens, it is hard to know how much it affected the study results.

For example, if people in one group received more attention and better care than people in the other group, this could make the nutrition intervention that they received look better than it is.

One way of keeping this from happening is not to let the people who provide the interventions know which people get which nutrition intervention (to “blind” them). That way they will not care for people differently because of knowing which intervention they got.

REMEMBER: Think about whether the people in the various intervention comparison groups received care that was different, other than the nutrition interventions being compared.