Probing Beyond: Looking into the Patterns within a High-Quality Diet

Dietary intake represents a complex and correlated mixture of foods and nutrients, and it is becoming increasingly understood that the associations of single nutrients with health do not provide a comprehensive understanding towards providing recommendations for healthy eating and should be supplemented with understanding of the effects of individual food and overall dietary patterns. Dietary patterns are an important part of understanding the role of nutrition in health and providing recommendations, as dietary patterns can take more of a whole-diet approach and consider the combined effects of foods (2-4). To emphasize the importance of considering diet more broadly, dietary patterns were emphasized in the 2 most recent releases of Dietary Guidelines for Americans. Further, evidence supports that dietary patterns are an important predictor of health.