In terms of food interaction and confounding, are associations with health outcomes likely to be direct, or could it be explained by other factors such as decreased consumption of other foods? How would design a study to address this question?
There is a whole chapter on nutritional epidemiology and its special problems in Rothman and Greenland Modern Epidemiology 2nd ed 1998 p 623-642.
generally speaking they recommend expsures shuold be measured if possible in nutrients, not foods, to get over the sort of problem you seem to have.
Thank you Dr.Leigh for your help.I am thinking of conducting a factor analysis for the food items from the Food Frequency Questionnaire(FFQ) and examine the way in which these items will be loaded with the specific dietary factors ( such as red meat); then, based on the results of this factor analysis, adjustment for all of these dietary factors can be done in order to determine if any of these factors will shift the adjusted hazard ratios or odds ratio away from the null.
In my opinion, I think it should be mixed effect, and food patterns analysis can apply to exam this mixed effects. Yes, you do factor analysis first to determine the patterns and use the factor score as dependent variables in regression model/
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