Patients in the critical care setting are at risk of malnutrition. The provision of nutrition support (enteral or parenteral) to critically ill patients is vital, but achieving the optimum quantity and balance is a contentious topic. There are two major and contradictory perspectives with respect to how much to feed critically ill patients. The first maintains that overfeeding is potentially harmful in the early phase, and argues for permissive underfeeding. The other argues that critically ill patients are underfed, and that the resultant kilocalorie and protein deficit results in poor outcomes, such as an increase in infections, longer ICU and hospital stays.

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