Dietary patterns of food consumption were investigated among young urban Toronto adults, including men and women from different ethnocultural groups.
We performed a cross-sectional analysis among 1153 adults aged 20 to 29 years, from the Toronto Nutrigenomics and Health Study. Principal components analysis of food intake scores was used to identify food consumption patterns. Logistic regression, analysis of variance, and t-tests were used to test for differences in dietary patterns between ethnocultural groups and between men and women. Partial correlations were used to investigate the relationship between patterns and nutrient intake.
Three predominant patterns were identified and termed "prudent," "Western," and "Eastern" patterns. Caucasians had significantly higher prudent pattern scores than did Asians and South Asians, while Asians had significantly higher Eastern pattern scores than did other ethnocultural groups (p