Excerpt:

Evaluating disease risk in relation to dietary patterns is an important endeavor in understanding the role of nutrition in disease risk. Given the correlated nature of nutrients in the diet, dietary patterns provide a way to take a more whole-diet approach and consider the combined effects of foods…  and are considered to represent the totality of habitual food and drink consumption… The importance of dietary patterns was emphasized in the 2015–2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans and carried forward to the 2020–2025 Dietary Guidelines for Americans… An important consideration is that there are a variety of ways in which to classify dietary patterns, and method selection will influence what associations between dietary patterns and disease risk are observed… This consideration underscores the importance of selecting a dietary pattern classification method that aligns with a well-developed research question, as is done by Brayner et al…. in this issue of the Journal of Nutrition.