Guilt by association: Plant-based foods can be incorporated into both healthy and unhealthy plant-based diet indices associated with coronary heart disease.

Statistically significant associations between hPDI, uPDI, and PDI and incident CHD were not replicated. Small perturbations of the scoring approach had varied impacts on HRs. Agnostically constructing diet indices demonstrated the potential for guilt (or benefit) by association: any of the food groups we studied could be categorized with others in an index showing beneficial or deleterious associations.