Food-Based Interventions as Therapy for Inflammatory Bowel Disease: Important Steps in Diet Trial Design and Reporting of Outcomes

Diet therapy for inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is an international research priority but guidance for IBD-specific diet trial design is lacking. This review critically evaluates key elements of prospective IBD food-based intervention trials and identifies gaps. Electronic databases were searched for interventional IBD diet studies. Prospective primary studies/trials were included if used food-based dietary strategies. Forty studies/trials evaluating 29 food-based strategies as therapy for IBD were identified. Considerable heterogeneity in diets, trial design, and methodology exists. Thirty-one trials (78%) intended the diet to modulate inflammation but 14/31 (46%) did not have a primary endpoint measuring an objective change in inflammatory activity and 20/31 (65%) controlled for medication stability prior to application of diet at baseline. Higher-quality IBD diet trials used symptom-based assessment tools coupled with an objective evaluation of inflammatory activity. Dietary advice trials are the most common. One-third of trials developed and administered diet education without a dietitian. Evaluation and reporting on adherence to diet therapy occurred in <60% of trials. Failure to include or report on key elements of trial design reduced the interpretability and validity of the results. This is a considerable limitation to advancing scientific knowledge in this area. Diet therapy trials should adhere to similar rigorous quality standards used to develop other IBD therapies. Therefore, a set of practical recommendations was generated to provide the authors' perspective to help inform the future design of high-quality IBD diet trials.