How Good Is Your Diet for Crohn’s?

If you have Crohn’s disease, your diet goals likely go beyond tracking your macros or trying to eat enough protein. For you, the best diet is one that helps minimize flares and digestive symptoms, while providing the nutrients you need to stay healthy.

Complicating matters: There’s no one diet that works for everyone — and the food that triggers one person’s abdominal pain and cramping may not bother someone else. While it’s important to work with a nutritionist or dietitian to work out a more specific eating plan, says Reezwana Chowdhury, MD, a gastroenterologist and assistant professor of medicine in the gastroenterology department at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, there are a few known ways your diet can affect your symptoms.

Take this quiz to assess how your current diet is affecting you and whether there are changes you can make to improve your Crohn’s symptoms.

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Additional Sources

Common Micronutrient Deficiencies in IBD. Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation. January 2017.
Diet, Culture, and Your Body. Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation.
Diet, Nutrition, and Inflammatory Bowel Disease. Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation. December 2019.
Eating and Drinking With IBD. Crohn’s and Colitis Canada.
Fatigue. Crohn’s & Colitis UK. March 2025.
Finding an IBD-Focused Dietitian. Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation.
Frequently Asked Dietary Questions in IBD. Crohn’s & Colitis Australia. August 2025.
Limketkai BN et al. Dietary Patterns and Their Association With Symptoms Activity in Inflammatory Bowel Disease. Inflammatory Bowel Diseases. November 2022.
Loss of Appetite. Crohn’s and Colitis Canada.
Malnutrition and Weight Loss. Crohn’s and Colitis Canada.
Vitamin and Mineral Supplementation. Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation.
What Should I Eat With IBD? Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation.

Ira Daniel Breite, MD

Medical Reviewer

Castle Connolly Top Doctor

Ira Daniel Breite, MD, is a board-certified internist and gastroenterologist. He is an associate professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, where he also sees patients and helps run an ambulatory surgery center.

Dr. Breite divides his time between technical procedures, reading about new topics, and helping patients with some of their most intimate problems. He finds the deepest fulfillment in the long-term relationships he develops and is thrilled when a patient with irritable bowel syndrome or inflammatory bowel disease improves on the regimen he worked with them to create.

Breite went to Albert Einstein College of Medicine for medical school, followed by a residency at NYU and Bellevue Hospital and a gastroenterology fellowship at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Working in city hospitals helped him become resourceful and taught him how to interact with people from different backgrounds.

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Erin Coakley

Author

Erin guides editorial direction and content for custom projects. Before joining Everyday Health, she was associate editor at dLife, an online resource for people managing diabetes. Erin majored in English with a minor in psychology at Stonehill College in Easton, Massachusetts. Outside of work she enjoys reading, going to concerts, traveling, and working out. She recently did 867 pushups in an hour to help send children with serious illnesses to camp.

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