“…More recently, to capture the synergies and cumulative effects of the overall diet and overcome problems of confounding by other factors of the diet, a dietary pattern analysis has been used to assess these relationships [19,20]. In general, two different approaches to extract dietary patterns have been defined: “a priori”, which concentrate on the construction of patterns or dietary indexes based on previous knowledge of a “healthy or unhealthy diet”; and “a posteriori”, which use exploratory statistical techniques (factor analysis, cluster analysis, or reduce rank regression analysis), and the observed dietary data [19,21,22,23]. As diets differ globally with respect to food choice and recommendations, we focus here on “a posteriori” methods because these statistical techniques could help us to avoid heterogeneity, and identify studies [24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42,43,44,45,46,47,48,49,50,51,52,53,54] that have evaluated the association between dietary patterns, BMD, bone mineral content (BMC), or fracture incidence.…”