Dietary patterns derived by statistical procedures is a way to identify overall dietary habits in specific populations. The aim of this study was to identify and characterise dietary patterns in Swedish adults using data from the national dietary survey Riksmaten adults 2010-11 (952 women, 788 men). Principal component analyses were used and two patterns were identified in both sexes: a healthy pattern loading positively on vegetables, fruits, fish and seafood, and vegetable oils, and negatively on refined bread and fast food, and a Swedish traditional pattern loading positively on potatoes, meat and processed meat, full-fat milk products, sweet bakery products, sweet condiments and margarine. In addition, a light-meal pattern was identified in women with positive loadings on fibre-rich bread, cheese, rice, pasta and food grain dishes, substitute products for meat and dairy products, candies and tea. The healthy pattern was positively correlated to dietary fibre (r 0·51-0·58) and n-3 (r 0·25-0·31) (all P < 0·0001), and had a higher nutrient density of folate, vitamin D and Se. The Swedish traditional and the light-meal pattern were positively correlated to added sugar (r 0·20-0·25) and the Swedish traditional also to SFA (r 0·13-0·21) (all P < 0·0001); both patterns were in general negatively correlated to micronutrients. Dietary pattern scores were associated with, for example, age, physical activity, education and income. In conclusion, we identified three major dietary patterns among Swedish adults. The patterns can be further used for examining the association between whole diet and health outcomes. Dietary pattern analysis has become a popular method for studying overall diet and associations between diet and disease risk. Pre-specified indices are used to measure adherence to recommendations or diets with hypothesised health implications, whereas data-driven methods, often factor or cluster analysis, are applied to identify underlying food patterns in a population empirically (1,2) . Participants' adherence to the dietary patterns can then serve as a holistic measure of their diet in assessment of diet-disease relationships. Such a holistic approach has several methodological advantages, as it includes unexplored dietary factors and nutrient interactions and increases the chance of detecting small but meaningful associations as they add up in the context of a whole diet, and at the same time not impeded by the disadvantages of correlated intakes (1,3) . Indeed, throughout the past decades, dietary patterns have been related to multiple health outcomes, mainly morbidity and mortality from CVD and cancer, longevity and neurodegenerative diseases (4)(5)(6)(7)(8)(9)(10)(11) . From the perspective of public health promotion, dietary patterns reflect the foods commonly consumed together. Hence, promoting healthy dietary patterns, in addition to targeted food-based dietary guidelines, might be a useful approach in order to improve diet and health in a population. Understanding the underlying dietary habi...