Diet to improve disease control in patients with inflammatory bowel disease

Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is a chronic debilitating disease that mainly affects adolescents and young adults, leading to diarrhea, abdominal pain, blood loss and a decreased quality of life. Available therapeutic options only allow for temporary disease control in a proportion of patients, but a considerable group of patients still lack an effective therapy to control the disease. Several factors are thought to play an important role in the cause of IBD, among which environmental factors. The increasing incidence of IBD in Asia and Eastern Europe suggests dietary may be partly responsible. Furthermore, some dietary interventions (e.g. formula-based liquid diet in children) have proven to be efficacious in controlling disease activity. We recently developed a diet aiming at improving the gut bacteria and inflammation by decreasing the consumption of proinflammatory foods (e.g. emulsifiers), called the FIT diet. The FIT diet was tested in healthy volunteers (HV) and patients with ulcerative colitis, which is a subtype of IBD. The FIT diet led to a significant decrease in intestinal inflammation. We now aim at testing the FIT diet in patients with Crohn’s disease (WP1). We will also study the effect of a simplified FIT diet in the intestinal inflammation (WP 2). The cooking process can also influence the intestinal inflammation due to the production of advanced glycation end products. We plan to test this hypothesis in interventional trial in HV and patients (WP3).