Understanding dietary patterns is important when treating medical conditions related to food choices. Factors such as culture, religion, and social norms can dictate these patterns. Treatment recommendations may include modifying patterns and introducing new foods to establish new habits for life.
Dietary patterns are frameworks that people tend to follow when choosing what to eat. Various factors can determine what people eat, and many of these factors overlap in various ways. When treating a patient with a medical condition that appears to be related to dietary choices, it can be important to understand the patterns the patient is following. Treatment recommendations may include adjusting these patterns to incorporate different or more appropriate foods.
Nationality, culture, economic class, religion, and social norms can dictate dietary patterns. Within an established pattern, familiar foods, preparation methods, and flavors tend to occur repeatedly. In addition to seeing some foods more often than others, it is also possible to see taboo, forbidden, or generally unpleasant foods. People who study dietary patterns include nutritionists and anthropologists interested in learning more about various human populations.
The term “traditional diet” is often used to describe dietary patterns that are customary for indigenous populations in a region. These diets are generally based on native plant and animal food sources that can be gathered, hunted, or farmed. Traditional diets can vary widely, from diets rich in fish and seals eaten above the Arctic Circle to foods rich in fruit eaten in some regions of the South Pacific.
Other types of dietary patterns include religious diets, such as kosher foods eaten by members of the Jewish faith, and the strict vegetarian diet eaten by Jains. Other patterns can be categorized in terms of the breakdown of nutrient intake by type, such as the “meat and potatoes” pattern that is heavy in meats and starches or the low-fat diet that some people adopt to lose weight. Assessing dietary patterns can be done with a survey that asks people to answer a series of questions about what they usually eat.
If changes must be made to a patient’s diet for health reasons, entire patterns must be modified. Simply telling someone to cut down on meat, for example, will still leave that person relying on dietary patterns that feature meat as a key ingredient. The patient may have difficulty sticking to the diet and seek substitutions, rather than rethinking the diet by adding new items to it. Establishing new dietary patterns may require introducing people to recipes, showing them how to find and cook new food families, and providing information on how to meet nutritional needs with a new diet. The goal is to change the patient’s habits, not just in the short term, but for life.
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