Nutrition in critical illness: a current conundrum

Critically ill people are unable to eat. What's the best way to feed them? Nutrition authorities have long recommended providing generous amounts of protein and calories to critically ill patients, either intravenously or through feeding tubes, in order to counteract the catabolic state associated with this condition. In practice, however, patients in modern intensive care units are substantially underfed. Several large randomized clinical trials were recently carried out to determine the clinical implications of this situation. Contradicting decades of physiological, clinical, and observational data, the results of these trials have been claimed to justify the current practice of systematic underfeeding in the intensive care unit. This article explains and suggests how to resolve this conundrum.