Looking for a good beach read?
Might I recommend the hot-off-the-press ECCO Consensus on Dietary Management of Inflammatory Bowel Disease? 😆
That’s what I’ll be diving into next week while I’m at the shore with my family. (I’m lots of fun!)
In case you’re not familiar, ECCO stands for the European Crohn’s and Colitis Organisation.
This new consensus covers:
- Diet as therapy to induce remission
- Diet as therapy to maintain remission
- Dietary management of comorbidities and special conditions of IBD
- Nutritional assessment and optimization for IBD
- Diet as prevention of IBD development
On first skim, there’s plenty of “there is insufficient evidence to recommend…”
Isn’t that always the way?
I love seeing nutrition and diet front and center for IBD—huge kudos to the ECCO team for pulling this together—but please take these recommendations with a grain of salt.
I really don’t want us slipping back to telling patients, “Eat whatever you want—there’s not enough research to say otherwise.”
The reality is most diet and supplement studies for IBD don’t measure gold-standard outcomes like endoscopic healing, radiologic change, or biochemical markers.
That’s where our clinical experience and real-world patient outcomes matter so much.
So, while I do recommend giving these guidelines a read—especially the sections on partial enteral nutrition (PEN) and micronutrient deficiencies—please do so with your professional lens on.
Those are my two cents, anyway!
As always, I’ll be updating my IBD nutrition course to reflect the latest recommendations, including these. If you’d like me to send you a running list of what’s new as I go, just hit reply and say “course updates.”
