Western pattern diet

The Western pattern diet, also called Western dietary pattern or the meat-sweet diet, is a dietary pattern originally identified through principal components analysis or factor analysis to identify commonly associated foods in the diets of several independent cohorts in the United States, with a very similar "Western" pattern also observed in a cohort of Australian adolescents. It is characterized by higher intakes of red and processed meat, butter, high-fat dairy products, eggs, refined grains, white potatoes and french fries, and high-sugar drinks. It is contrasted with a "prudent" diet found in the same populations, which has higher levels of fruits, vegetables, whole-grain foods, poultry and fish.

The western-versus-eastern dichotomy has become less relevant as such a diet is no longer "foreign" to any global region (just as traditional East Asian cuisine is no longer "foreign" to the west), but the term is still a well-understood shorthand in medical literature, regardless of where the diet is found. Other dietary patterns described in the medical research include "drinker" and "meat-eater" patterns. Because of the variability in diets, individuals are usually classified not as simply "following" or "not following" a given diet, but instead by ranking them according to how closely their diets line up with each pattern in turn. The researchers then compare the outcomes between the group that most closely follows a given pattern to the group that least closely follows a given pattern.