Dietary patterns research is being pursued to provide a comprehensive way to characterize dietary exposures and explore diet-disease relationships. This paper outlines the need for further research into dietary pattern methodologies, and introduces papers presented at the Canadian Society for Clinical Nutrition-Canadian Society for Nutritional Sciences (now called Canadian Nutrition Society) Conference, held in Québec City in 2009. Themes that emerged include inconsistency of evidence linking diet patterns to risk of certain diseases, methodological issues around data collection and analysis, and the limitations of dietary pattern research for nutrition policy and recommendations.