nitially, we identified two food pattern scores because the number of extracted X scores is always equal to the number of response variables. Only the first score was retained for subsequent analyses because the second score was not associated with diabetes (P = 0.51). To reduce the dependency of the score from the data, we simplified the score by including only food groups with high factor loadings S 0.2 and then summing the standardized food group intake while retaining the direction of the factor loading (9). The simplified pattern score was subsequently categorized into quartiles.