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Dietary Surveys and Nutritional Epidemiology
India has a rich and highly varied cuisine, and its various diets are strongly related to social identity, religion and other cultural factors(1), as well as local agricultural practices and availability of diverse foods(2). The 'average diet' in a country as large and geographically diverse as India is therefore likely to be of little relevance from a public health nutrition perspective. The identification of common dietary patterns relevant to population sub-groups in India, as well as their association with epidemiological profiles, is important.
A number of previous studies have used data from dietary surveys to identify distinct dietary patterns in India and to characterise the consumers of these patterns(3). These studies have differed in both the data used to measure food consumption and the methods used to define dietary patterns. Previous studies have used a number of local and regional dietary surveys available in India that come from diverse sources and represent different sub-populations and time periods. Nationally representative data are rare because of the scale of undertaking national dietary surveys in such a large country.
In terms of methods, previous studies of dietary patterns have commonly used data-driven methods to identify foods that are typically consumed in combination with one another, or that tend to be consumed by the same type of individuals. However, there is no universally agreed method for such analyses, and several different statistical methods are in common use. These methods can be broadly divided into analyses of dominant 'factors' in the diet - for example principal component analysis (PCA) and factor analysis - or analyses of 'clustering' of foods in the diet - for example k-means clustering and latent class analysis (LCA)(4).
This systematic review aims to draw together the existing literature of dietary modelling studies, to identify common dietary patterns reported for India and their primary socio-demographic characteristics. A greater knowledge of the main dietary patterns in India is important for nutrition and health policy makers to understand distributions and trends in diets within populations, as well as their relationships with health outcomes. This is especially important, as India undergoes a significant dietary transition from traditional...