Selection of studies for inclusion in the meta-analyses
The primary search yielded 684 studies from 3 databases (PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Sciences). After removing duplicates, 635 identified trials remained, of which 598 were excluded during the review of the title and abstract (Fig. 1). Full texts of the remaining 37 studies were obtained and assessed. Of those, 15 studies met our inclusion criteria. Finally, we conducted the dose-response meta-analysis with 13 eligible trials on body weight, 12 on BMI, and 8 on WC. The between-reviewer agreement for including studies was near perfect (Cohen’s kappa = 0.87) at the full-text screening step. The excluded studies at the full-text level, along with the reasons for their exclusion are shown in Supplementary Table 2.
Flow chart of the literature search. BW;…