Dietary Patterns
category
Dietary patterns are the characteristic habitual combinations of foods, food groups, and nutrient profiles that constitute an individual's overall dietary approach — with mounting evidence that the synergistic interaction of whole dietary patterns predicts health outcomes more strongly than any individual nutrient, food, or food group, and that the most studied patterns (Mediterranean, DASH, whole-food plant-based, traditional diets of long-lived populations) share more commonalities (whole foods, plant predominance, minimal ultra-processing) than they have differences in their specific food choices.
Role
Dietary pattern research is the corrective to the reductionist single-nutrient approach that has dominated nutritional science — and dominated popular nutrition — for decades, producing the endless cycle of nutrients being elevated to saviors and then implicated as villains as isolated nutrients fail to replicate the health benefits of the whole food patterns that contain them. Understanding that it is the dietary pattern rather than individual nutrients that primarily determines health outcomes liberates people from the nutritional anxiety of optimizing specific nutrients while eating an overall poor quality diet — redirecting attention to the characteristics shared by all evidence-based healthy dietary patterns.
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Subtopics
- Mediterranean Pattern The traditional Mediterranean dietary pattern is characterized by high consumption of vegetables, le…
- Whole-Food Plant-Based The whole-food plant-based (WFPB) dietary pattern emphasizes unprocessed or minimally processed plan…
- DASH Diet The DASH (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) diet was developed through NIH-funded research sp…
- Blue Zones Eating Blue Zones are the five geographic regions with the highest concentrations of centenarians — Sardini…
- Ketogenic Diet The ketogenic diet restricts carbohydrates to <50g/day (typically 5% of calories) to deplete glycoge…
- Paleo Diet The Paleolithic dietary approach models eating patterns on presumed ancestral diets before agricultu…
- Carnivore Diet The carnivore diet consists exclusively of animal products — primarily meat, fish, eggs, and some da…
- Intuitive Eating Intuitive eating is the non-diet approach to food that rejects external dietary rules in favor of in…
- Time-Restricted Eating Time-restricted eating (TRE) is the dietary pattern of consuming all calories within a consistent da…
- Dietary Adherence Dietary adherence — the capacity to maintain a chosen dietary pattern consistently over months and y…