Editorial and clinical review policy

This policy covers the content we write: our guides, explainer pages such as how it works and our FAQs, and these trust and standards pages. It’s general information, not medical advice.

It doesn’t cover practitioner profiles. Practitioners write their own profiles, and we verify their registration, not everything they say about themselves (see how we verify practitioners). Reviews are covered by our reviews policy. foodfacts.org’s fact-checks follow foodfacts.org’s own fact-checking policies (opens in a new tab).

Our guides and pages are written by the FoodFacts CONNECT team, part of foodfacts.org. Each guide says who wrote it and when it was last updated. You can meet the people behind CONNECT on our About page.

Our Clinical Lead, Aenya Greene, is a Registered Dietitian on the HCPC register. Before we publish a new guide, she or another Registered Dietitian reviews it. The reviewer checks that the guide:

• is accurate and in line with current evidence and guidance;
• is safe, including telling readers when to see their GP or get urgent help;
• is fair to the professions it describes, and clear about what each one can and can’t do.

A reviewed guide shows the reviewer’s name and the date of the review next to the byline. If a guide doesn’t show a review line, it hasn’t had clinical review yet. If the writer and the reviewer disagree on a clinical point, we don’t publish until it’s resolved.

• Every factual claim in a guide must be traceable to a source listed at the end of the guide. If we can’t verify a fact, we leave it out.
• We go to primary sources first: legislation, regulators and their registers, the NHS and the HSE, and professional bodies such as the British Dietetic Association and the Association for Nutrition.
• On questions of nutrition science, we prefer clinical guidelines and systematic reviews to single studies. We don’t rely on press releases, social media posts or product marketing.
• We link to our sources so you can check them yourself, and we say when the evidence is uncertain or still developing.

• We don’t carry advertising or sponsored content, and we don’t use affiliate links.
• Practitioners can’t pay to be mentioned or recommended in our guides, and our guides don’t recommend individual practitioners.
• CONNECT earns commission on bookings (see how we make money). Our guides still send you to the official registers, so you can check any professional, whether or not they’re on CONNECT.
• Anyone who writes or reviews a guide must tell us about any conflict of interest, such as a business that could benefit from it. If they have one, someone else does that work.
• Some of our team are dietitians or nutritionists themselves. If any of them are listed on CONNECT, they’re verified and ordered in search results in exactly the same way as everyone else.

foodfacts.org explains how it protects its independence and manages conflicts of interest in its independence and transparency policy (opens in a new tab).

• Every guide shows the date it was last updated.
• We aim to review each guide at least once every 12 months, and sooner if a regulator changes its rules or its register, if the evidence changes, or if someone tells us something is out of date.
• We only change the “last updated” date when we change the content, never just to make a page look newer.
• If we find a mistake, we fix it under our corrections policy.

We use AI writing tools to help draft, structure and edit some of our content, including these policy pages. AI tools don’t decide what we publish. A member of our team checks every fact against our sources before anything goes live, and new guides also have clinical review by a Registered Dietitian.

We don’t use AI to write reviews, to create or change anyone’s credentials, or to give health advice. We also use AI image tools to create some of the illustrations on the site. They’re illustrations, not photos, and they never show real practitioners.

If you think something we’ve written is wrong, out of date or unclear, please tell us. Our corrections policy explains how we check what you send us and how we label corrections.