Industrialized complementary food for infants and young children: a systematic review protocol of their nutrient profile and impact on health outcomes.

Complementary feeding plays an important role in the patterns of growth, development and formation of eating habits. Although the consumption of complementary foods (CF) with an inadequate Nutrient Profile (NP) is considered a risk factor for morbidities, there are still few studies that assess its repercussions on childrens diet and health. This review aims to identify the participation of industrialized CF consumption in childrens diet, the NP of these foods, and their impact on quality diet and on health of children under two years of age. This is a protocol study for systematic review registered in the International Prospective Register of Systematic Reviews (PROSPERO) CDR 42022321891, following recommendations of the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-analysis Protocols (PRISMA-P). We will seek out cross-sectional or cohort studies investigating the NP of industrialized CF recommended for children up to two years and/or that evaluated the association between the CF consumption and the childrens diet and health. The search for records will be conducted on PubMed/Medline, Scopus, Embase, Web of Science, and Scielo. Two independent reviewers will perform all steps of the systematic review. The methodological quality will be analyzed using the Newcastle-Ottawa scale (NOS) and Risk of Bias 2 (RoB 2). Results will be presented by means, medians, confidence interval (95%), standard deviation for the NP of foods, and to assess the health impact, comparisons of outcome measures, effect sizes (ORs and RRs) will be extracted. The high consumption of industrialized CF and the negative impact on childrens health, in addition to the gap in the literature of studies assessing the NP and consumption of these foods by children under 24 months, justify the importance of a review on this subject focusing on that age group.