Patients hoping to improve their understanding of treatments recommended by their providers frequently turn to the Internet as their source of information. Medical foods are emerging adjunct treatments in Inflammatory Bowel Diseases (IBD) with a growing body of evidence to support their use. Medical foods are, according to the FDA, a food product used for the dietary management of a disease under medical supervision. We aimed to evaluate the readability and quality of the information available on the Internet concerning the four evidence-based medical foods used in IBD – VSL#3, EnteraGam, Modulen IBD and Vivonex. The name of each of the four medical foods was individually entered into the search engine Google followed by IBD. The top 30 website results for each treatment were evaluated for the quality of health consumer content using the validated DISCERN instrument. The DISCERN scores were categorized as Excellent 63-75, Good 51-62, Fair 39-50, Poor 27-38, and Very Poor < 26. R^2 was calculated for the search result rank order and the DISCERN scores. Readability was evaluated using the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level calculation and compared using a T-test. 122 websites were evaluated by the DISCERN instrument. The mean DISCERN scores were in the poor category with the exception of VSL#3 which was fair (Table 1). There was no relation between the DISCERN score and the rank order of a website generated by the search engine. The mean Flesch-Kincaid grade level was high school level or above and was not different when professional sources were excluded (P=0.4). The quality of information on Medical Foods found online is on-average poor based on the DISCERN score. Furthermore, the majority of the information is written in language at a level that requires at least a high school education - a challenge for a large portion of health consumers. There is a paucity of high-quality information about Medical Foods that is written in patient-centered language.
