Compare methods

	Nutrition Environment Measures Survey	Dietary Pattern Analysis
Field	Food Agriculture Studies	Food Agriculture Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2007	2002
Originator	Karen Glanz, James F. Sallis, Brian E. Saelens & Lawrence D. Frank	Frank B. Hu; P. K. Newby & Katherine L. Tucker
Type	Observational audit pipeline for the consumer nutrition environment	Multivariate pipeline for deriving empirical dietary patterns from food intake
Seminal source	Glanz, K., Sallis, J. F., Saelens, B. E., & Frank, L. D. (2007). Nutrition Environment Measures Survey in Stores (NEMS-S): Development and Evaluation. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 32(4), 282-289.	Hu, F. B. (2002). Dietary pattern analysis: a new direction in nutritional epidemiology. Current Opinion in Lipidology, 13(1), 3-9.
Aliases	NEMS, NEMS-S, NEMS-R, Nutrition Environment Measurement Survey	Empirical Dietary Patterns, A Posteriori Dietary Patterns, Data-Driven Dietary Patterns, Eating Pattern Analysis
Related	4	4
Summary	The Nutrition Environment Measures Survey (NEMS) is a family of structured observation instruments for assessing the consumer nutrition environment — the in-store and in-restaurant conditions that shape what people can actually buy and eat. Developed by Karen Glanz, James Sallis, Brian Saelens and Lawrence Frank and published in 2007, NEMS-S audits retail food stores and NEMS-R audits restaurants, each scoring the availability, price and quality of healthier options relative to standard ones. Trained raters apply a fixed protocol so that two independent observers reach the same verdict, and the resulting scores let researchers compare neighbourhoods, link environments to diet and obesity, and evaluate interventions. NEMS is widely regarded as a foundational, validated tool for measuring the food environment and has been adapted across diverse settings since its release.	Dietary pattern analysis is the nutritional-epidemiology application of multivariate statistics that identifies how foods are actually eaten together, summarizing the whole diet into a few empirical patterns rather than studying single nutrients in isolation. Introduced as a research direction by Frank Hu in his 2002 Current Opinion in Lipidology review and surveyed methodologically by Newby and Tucker in 2004, the approach takes a matrix of food-group intakes and applies factor (principal component) analysis, cluster analysis, or reduced-rank regression to extract a posteriori patterns such as a 'prudent' pattern rich in fruits, vegetables, and whole grains and a 'Western' pattern high in red meat and refined foods. While the underlying algebra is generic principal component or cluster analysis, what makes this a distinct method is its substantive construction: the input is the food-group intake matrix of the whole diet, and the output is interpretable eating patterns linked to disease.