Bradley Johnston

Professional Summary

Dr. Bradley Johnston is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Nutrition (primary appointment), Epidemiology and Biostatistics at Texas A&M University. His work involves health status measurement (e.g. minimal patient/population important difference; quality of life), and the application of randomized trial, meta-analysis and clinical and dietary guideline recommendation methods to a wide range of areas, with a particular interest in Evidence-Based Nutrition (EBN). Evidence-based nutrition practice and policy emphasizes the best available data from human studies for health outcomes that are important to patients and members of the public (e.g. risk of cancer, heart disease; quality of life, dietary satisfaction). EBN is sometimes at odds with the status quo as evidenced by the debates over red meat and health outcomes. Bradley believes the path forward requires exceptional leadership and extensive and thoughtful cross and interdisciplinary conversations around the complexities of nutrition/ health behavior research, causal inference and the strength of guideline recommendations.

As the Director and Co-founder of the EvidenceBasedNutrition.org Education and Research Program, Bradley leads an international consortium of educators, researchers and research trainees developing educational materials to support evidence-based nutrition practice, as well as high quality, value-added systematic reviews and guideline recommendations on major clinical and public health nutrition questions. His work focuses on diet and health behavior patterns for treating and preventing obesity, diabetes, cancer and cardiovascular disease. He also leads and supports “research on research” to help advance the methods for clinical and population health decision making. For instance, EvidenceBasedNutrition.org produced the NutriRECS systematic reviews and dose-response meta-analyses to inform guideline recommendations on red meat published in Annals of Internal Medicine (2019). NutriRECS was the first group in the world to robustly develop a nutrition guideline using internationally recognized methodological standards (PRISMA, AGREE, GRADE, IOM/NAM, NEATS), including the reporting of absolute estimates of effect and the certainty of evidence for all estimates of effect for all important health and surrogate outcomes, while contextualizing their recommendations based on public values and preferences. The NutriRECS findings on the certainty/strength of evidence for red meat have subsequently been independently corroborated by the Global Burden of Disease group in Nature Medicine (2022). Note: while critical to address, environmental and animal welfare related to meat have not been addressed by NutriRECS.

As a leading advocate for evidence-based practice and policy, Bradley regularly leads seminars, workshops, classes and journal clubs for nutrition students and allied health professionals. He has published first and senior authored nutrition research in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), British Medical Journal (BMJ), Annals of Internal Medicine, American Journal of Clinical Nutrition and Advances in Nutrition. To support evidence-based nutrition practice, in collaboration with students, post-docs and academic faculty, three Nutrition Users’ Guides (i.e. how to assess risk of bias, interpret statistical results and apply results from RCTs and systematic reviews addressing nutrition evidence) have been published, with additional Guides in the works. He has a Google H-Index of 65, considered exceptional for his career stage according to Hirsch’s categorization scheme, and the work he has collaboratively contributed to has been cited in over 90 policy documents.

Publications

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