Where else to look.
Twenty-one places I actually use. Charities, national health services, food databases, guidelines you can hand your doctor, and rooms full of people who have been where you are.
Nobody paid to be on this page. No affiliate links.
When I came out of hospital the second time I had a discharge letter, a bag of enzymes and a browser full of tabs. Most of those tabs were junk. These are the ones that survived.
None of them competes with the book. They are the opposite: the primary sources, the charities, the raw numbers. The book is what I built after reading all of it, so you would not have to.
One thing on this site is mine and belongs next to them: the fat budget calculator. It turns your phase into grams of fat per meal and lets you plan the day against it.
Start with what actually happened to you
Plain language, written by people who do this for a living, free to read.
US National Institutes of Health
NIDDK: Pancreatitis
The closest thing to a neutral baseline. Definition, symptoms, causes, how it gets diagnosed, how it gets treated, and a separate page on eating and nutrition. No advertising, no supplement funnel, and it is what a lot of other sites are quietly rewriting.
Guts UK, registered charity
Guts UK: Acute and chronic pancreatitis
The warmest of the big information pages, and the only one with a phone number attached. Printable PDF versions of every guide, a separate chronic pancreatitis section, patient stories, and a helpline on 0300 102 4887 if you would rather talk to a human than read.
Cleveland Clinic
Cleveland Clinic: Pancreatitis
Useful when you want a hospital saying plainly what the complications are and when to stop reading and go to an emergency department. Reviewed August 2026, so it is current.
Charities that will pick up the phone
Not content farms. Organisations with staff, research funding and, in one case, help paying for your prescriptions.
United States
National Pancreas Foundation
Their directory of NPF Centers of Excellence is the most practical thing on the site. If your local gastroenterologist sees two cases of pancreatitis a year, this is how you find the hospital that sees two hundred. They also run patient education events and a free online support community.
Mission: Cure
Mission: Cure resource hub
The best page I know of for the boring, expensive parts of this disease. Webinars with pancreas dietitians, toolkits on genetic testing, a factsheet that pushes back on the assumption that every pancreatitis patient is a drinker, and a list of programmes that help pay for enzymes and medical bills.
The complications nobody explains on the way out
Enzymes and blood sugar. Two things that get one sentence at discharge and then run your life.
Exocrine pancreatic insufficiency
How to dose pancreatic enzymes
Five minutes with Dr Steven Freedman on what nobody tells you: how many capsules, when in the meal to take them, and which symptoms mean the dose is wrong. If your stools still float, watch this before your next appointment.
Type 3c diabetes
Type 3c, the diabetes that comes from the damage
Diabetes caused by a damaged pancreas is not type 1 and it is not type 2, and being treated as though it were is how people end up with hypos nobody expected. Worth reading before it happens, not after.
For your doctor
AGA clinical guidance on EPI
The American Gastroenterological Association advice in full, including the fecal elastase cut-offs and a starting dose of at least 40,000 units of lipase with every meal in adults. Print it if you are being told 10,000 units is enough.
Putting a real number on the fat
A fat budget only works if you can look things up. These three do the looking up.
US Department of Agriculture
FoodData Central
The reference database sitting behind most nutrition apps, free and without an account. When two apps disagree about how much fat is in a chicken thigh, this is the tie-breaker.
Non-profit, volunteer run
Open Food Facts
Scan the barcode in the supermarket aisle and get fat per 100 grams off the packet. Better than the American databases for European products, which matters if you shop in Europe and keep hitting foods the US apps have never heard of.
Free tier, commercial company
Cronometer
If you are going to track grams of fat, track them somewhere that shows grams of fat rather than burying it under a calorie score. The free account is enough. I am not affiliated with them and there is no referral code in this link.
Other people who get it
Start with ours, it is free and it is the one I am in every day. Read the outside forums for a week before you post. They have good days and bad days.
Free, run by me
The PancreasZen community
A group for people living with pancreatitis. Nine categories including Just diagnosed, Food and eating, Mental Health and Wins, recipes and articles posted as they land, and the Safe Foods Checklist free inside. No charge and no card. I answer in there myself.
Free, sponsored by the National Pancreas Foundation
Inspire pancreatitis community
The most active English-language pancreatitis forum I know of, and moderated, which matters. Pain management, enzymes, what people ate and what happened next. Take the medical advice in there as what it is: other patients guessing, sometimes well.
Free, UK based, global membership
HealthUnlocked pancreatitis support
Quieter and more European than Inspire. Good for the questions you feel stupid asking, which is most of them in the first year.
If alcohol was part of the story
For some of us it was. For many of us it was not, and we got the lecture anyway. Either way these are free, government run, and nobody is going to shame you.
US National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism
Rethinking Drinking
Calculators, a 20 page booklet, and a worksheet on refusing a drink without explaining your medical history to the whole table. That last one is worth more than it sounds.
US National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism
Alcohol Treatment Navigator
If you want actual help rather than a leaflet, this walks you through finding treatment that is evidence based rather than whatever came up first in a search. US focused, but the questions it teaches you to ask travel.
What to hand your doctor
Treatment differs by country, sometimes by hospital. When you want to ask why, ask with the guideline in your hand.
Europe
ESPEN guidelines library
The European nutrition guidelines, published as free PDFs, including clinical nutrition in acute and chronic pancreatitis. This is where the early oral refeeding position comes from, and it is the document to have with you if you are still being told to fast for a week.
United States
ACG guidelines: management of acute pancreatitis (2024)
The American guideline, current version. Fluids, feeding, when to image, when not to. Dense, but the recommendation tables are readable by anyone.
United Kingdom
NICE guideline NG104: pancreatitis
What the NHS is supposed to do for acute and chronic pancreatitis in adults, young people and children. If you are in the UK and the care you are getting does not look like this, that is a conversation worth having.
Open access, academic
Pancreapedia
A peer reviewed encyclopedia of the pancreas, written by researchers for researchers, free to read. Far too deep for most days. Exactly right on the day you want the mechanism rather than the summary.
US National Library of Medicine
ClinicalTrials.gov
Search pancreatitis and filter by country and recruiting status. Trials are not a treatment plan, but they are the honest answer to whether anyone is working on this, and sometimes one is recruiting near you.
Not in English
One to start with. If you know a good one in your language, tell me and it goes on this page.
Dutch
Pancreatitis Werkgroep Nederland
The Dutch pancreatitis working group, a network of hospitals and researchers. Clear patient pages on acute and chronic pancreatitis in Dutch, plus the studies currently running in the Netherlands.
And then there is the part none of them cover
Every site on this page tells you what pancreatitis is. None of them tells you what to cook on Tuesday, how many grams of fat that meal is allowed to be, or what to do at eleven at night when the pain starts again. That gap is the reason I wrote the book.
Every link here was checked on 18 September 2026. Nothing on this page is paid placement, sponsored or affiliate linked, and no organisation listed here has endorsed PancreasZen or the book. The links carry a tag that tells the other site the visit came from pancreaszen.com. Found a broken link, or something that belongs here? Write to hello@pancreaszen.com. This page is general information from one patient to another, not medical advice. See the medical disclaimer.