ABSTRACT
A paucity of information exists from societal guidelines to direct the nutritional management of the critically ill obese bariatric patient. Such an absence of guidelines in the middle of an epidemic of obesity implies that obese patients are treated no differently in the intensive care unit (ICU) than their lean counterparts. A single management strategy that has emerged from the literature is the provision of highprotein hypocaloric feeding (misconstrued as permissive underfeeding), which is based on mostly retrospective studies and a few small randomized trials.
