Early nutritional intervention has been advocated in trauma patients. We have developed a model to identify those patients who will most benefit from the invasive and costly measures that are required to provide injured patients with early enteral feedings. Four hundred forty-two patients admitted to a level I trauma center during a 2-month period were evaluated using 21 clinical variables. Time to tolerance of a regular diet was used as the dependent variable in a step-wise regression, and then the selected variables were used to build a classification and regression tree to predict tolerance of a regular diet within 5 days. Our findings demonstrate that intensive care unit disposition, Injury Severity Score, Abdominal Trauma Index, and the need for early surgical intervention are important predictors regarding the need for early nutritional intervention. When the model was applied to the study population, it had a sensitivity of 83%, a specificity of 84%, and an accuracy of 84%.