Navigating Nutritional Therapy

Join our mission to aid the integration of evidence-based nutritional therapy for inflammatory bowel disease. Please consider our organization for your Giving Tuesday Donation. With your gift, you help us to provide both clinicians and patients with evidence-based resources.

In 2022

• We launched Patient Pathway, a comprehensive resource developed through a unique collaborative effort among international nutrition leaders and experienced patients. Patient Pathway empowers patients to utilize nutrition through education, community, and nearly 1000 searchable recipes.
• We organized free webinars with top international speakers, increasing awareness about the efficacy of nutritional options.
• We held our exhibit at Digestive Disease Week and North American Society of Pediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition (NASPGHAN) , bringing the data and resources directly to hundreds of gastroenterologists and dietitians.;
• We expanded our extensive news & research database with comprehensive articles about the latest research and nutritional highlights of several conferences.
• We increased our social media presence, sharing both research and practical information on four different channels, increasing awareness among patients and clinicians alike.
  
  If you like what we do, please consider our organization for your Giving Tuesday Donation. Donations totaling up to $5000, will be matched by one of our donors.

Nutritional Therapy for IBD is proud to announce the launch of Patient Pathway. Patient Pathway is a resource to support healthy diet and lifestyle change in patients with Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis. It was developed as a unique collaborative effort between medical leaders in Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) and the patient community. Patients will find information, support, guidance, community, ideas, and recipes to aid in the implementation of nutritional therapy. Patient Pathway is built around An Option for Every Patient™, a patient-centric approach that seeks to match each patient with the dietary approach that best fits their needs and interest. The patient plays an active role in their dietary therapy.

There are numerous forms of nutritional therapy that can be used to help patients with IBD. Although ongoing research will continue to modify the approach, patients can benefit greatly by applying the information and options available today.

Nutritional therapy at its highest level can both improve clinical symptoms and reduce inflammation, leading to induction and/or maintenance of remission. While higher tiers of dietary intervention may provide greater reduction in symptoms and inflammation, more liberalized dietary options, including small steps of change for healthy eating, still provide benefit to patients and may be more practical for those without the interest or the resources to adopt more stringent dietary therapies. As nutritional therapy is well tolerated, with patients reporting improved quality of life (Sandell A et al), it is important to offer options for every level of interest to provide some level of benefit to each patient.

Patients with IBD suffer disproportionally higher rates of depression and anxiety, which are associated with a lower quality of life (Bernstein CN) (Byrne G et al) and correlated with active disease (Marrie RA et al). Furthermore, anxiety, depression, and fatigue are reported to be the most common severe symptoms of IBD in a recent international survey of patients (Rubin DT et al). Can diet impact the gut microbiota to influence the gut-brain axis and subsequently our mental health?