Research from the University of Gothenburg suggests that a healthy start in life, including diet and lifestyle choices, may lower the risk of developing inflammatory bowel disease, particularly Crohn’s disease, by early adulthood.
A healthy start in the first years of life may be linked with a lower chance of developing inflammatory bowel disease later on, according to research from the University of Gothenburg. The strongest signal was seen for Crohn’s disease, one of the two main forms of inflammatory bowel disease, or IBD.
IBD is a long-term condition in which the digestive tract becomes inflamed. Crohn’s disease can affect different parts of the gut, while ulcerative colitis mainly involves the large intestine. Symptoms can include abdominal pain, diarrhoea, fatigue and weight loss, and the illness can begin in childhood or early adulthood.
The study, led by Annie Guo, analysed data from 117,487 children in two Scandinavian birth cohorts. Researchers looked at a range of early-life influences, including cigarette smoke exposure, mode of delivery, breastfeeding, diet quality and antibiotic use, then added measures such as physical activity, sedentary time and body weight by age three. Children were followed through national health records, and by an average age of about 20, 732 had been diagnosed with IBD.
Children with the healthiest scores at age one had about a 23% lower risk of IBD than those with the least healthy patterns, the researchers found. For Crohn’s disease, the reduction was about 43%. A second scoring system produced similar results at age three, strengthening the case that early childhood may be an important window for gut and immune development. The study was published online on August 24, 2026, in the Journal of Crohn’s and Colitis.
The findings add to earlier work from the same research group suggesting that diet and other early exposures may matter. In related University of Gothenburg research, a higher intake of fish and vegetables at one year of age, together with lower consumption of sugar-sweetened drinks, was associated with a lower IBD risk. The team has also reported that daycare attendance at age three was linked with a lower risk of Crohn’s disease. Even so, the new study remains observational, so it cannot prove that a healthy early lifestyle directly prevents IBD, and the children were still relatively young at the end of follow-up.
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