Diversity indices and analysis of diet-cancer relationship

In epidemiologiacl studies concerning chronic disease, more often it is common to evaluate the relatioship between dietary habits, expressed as absolute intake of different nutrient/foods, and risk of disease. Total intake of a nutrient is usually scatterd among many food items and the modalities with which a nutrient is assimilated in the diet may act as a modifier of its impact on the risk. It would be of interst to quantify the different patterns of nutrients intake. This could be done by characterizing each nutrient assimilated in the diet with a diversity index to measure its degree of dispersion