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The safety of intermittent fasting, a popular strategy for losing weight by limiting food intake to a certain time, was thrown into question by a surprising finding from research presented at a medical meeting. Limiting mealtime to just eight hours a day increased the risk of death from heart disease by 91% in a study released Monday in Chicago. (Also read | Is intermittent fasting good or bad for your liver? expert answer,
The American Heart Association published only an abstract, leaving scientists to speculate about the details of the study protocol. According to the AHA, the study was reviewed by other experts before its release.
Lifestyle interventions aimed at weight loss have come under scrutiny as new generation medications help people lose weight. Some doctors questioned the study’s findings, saying they may be skewed by differences — such as underlying heart health — between the fasting patients and a comparison group whose members consumed food within a 12- to 16-hour daily window. Are.
“Time-restricted eating is popular as a means of reducing calorie intake,” Keith Frain, emeritus professor of human metabolism at the University of Oxford, said in a statement to the UK Science Media Centre. “This work is very important in showing that we need long-term studies on the effects of this practice. But this summary leaves many questions unanswered.
Researchers led by Victor Zhong of Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine analyzed data from nearly 20,000 adults included in the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.
The study looked at death data from 2003 to 2019, as well as questionnaire responses. Because it partly relied on forms that required patients to remember what they ate over two days, the scientists said there was room for potential inaccuracies. About half the patients were male and the average age was 48 years.
According to Zhong, it was not clear how long the patients continued intermittent fasting, although researchers assumed they did.
Patients who fasted were more likely to be young men with high BMI and food insecurity, he said by email. They also had a lower prevalence of high blood pressure, diabetes and heart disease, based on self-report. “We controlled for all of these variables in the analysis, but the positive association between 8-hour time-restricted eating and cardiovascular mortality remained,” said Zhong.
This abstract was presented at the AHA’s Lifestyle Scientific Sessions meeting in Chicago.
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