Advancing the Science of Dietary Patterns Research: Developing a Framework and Leveraging a Complex Systems Approach

“Dietary patterns” refers to a way of conceptualizing myriad diet exposures as a multidimensional construct. It is important because the collective elements of the diet may have synergistic and/or cumulative effects. Traditionally, dietary patterns have been defined as “the quantities, proportions, variety, or combination of different foods, drinks and nutrients in diets, and the frequency with which they are habitually consumed,” and that definition typically has been applied to what individuals are eating at a given point in their lives. The objective of this presentation is to describe how enhanced understanding may be gained from developing a dietary patterns framework that expands that definition to include additional layers of information other than nutrition, multiple levels of the environment beyond the individual, and the entire lifecourse rather than a point in time. The major reasons for conducting dietary patterns were found to be threefold: to describe dietary patterns for a population, to examine the relationship between dietary patterns and health and to understand the drivers of dietary patterns to ascertain the best means of affecting change. Given the challenges inherent in a multi‐layered, multi‐dimensional construct that 1) can be examined at multiple levels of scale, 2) varies over time for any given individual as well as among individuals, 3) results from a complex system with numerous drivers and 4) influences multiple outcomes, this presentation will further illustrate how the field of complex systems modeling may provide useful methods for addressing the various types of dietary patterns research.